


Mystery Meat

by mad_martha



Series: All Roads Lead To Haven [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural, The Sentinel, The X-Files, Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Action/Adventure, Bawdy Humour, Blood and Gore, Drama, Fantasy Law Enforcement, Humour, Innuendo, M/M, Swearing, mythical beasts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 07:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12836622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: Someone's pulling a pretty whacky scam in the Lower City. Sounds like another case for the Ropewalk Watch.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This begins in the gap before Castiel returns to Haven at the end of The Devil You Know. It was partly inspired by this article: [Unicorn Cookbook Found At The British Library](http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/04/unicorn-cookbook-found-at-the-british-library.html). This was supposed to be short and humorous, but like a lot of my stories it had its own ideas about that. I've also branched into a multi-universe crossover now, in case you hadn't noticed (hence the name of this series).
> 
> Warnings: There's quite a bit of gruesome stuff in this one. There's one short but very descriptive scene of a violent death/mutilated body, another where a dead and mutilated body is being examined, and a scene where body parts in varying conditions are discovered. It's a bit CSI: Valdemar in places, and the gore is Supernatural level in my estimation. So if you don't like CSI-type body part examination with added putrefaction and maybe a touch of ritual nastiness, you won't like this.
> 
> And I know very little about archery, so Wikipedia was my friend on this occasion. Apologies if I got anything horribly wrong.

Someone in a blue and tan Watch uniform adorned with captain's bars was sitting in the Roadhouse Inn when Dean walked in after his shift that evening.  He might have been concerned – Watch officers sitting at Ellen's bar usually meant they were waiting for him – but Dean knew those broad shoulders, so after only the barest pause he took the stool next to the visitor.

"Heyla, Jim – what you doin' here?" he demanded amiably.

Jim Ellison, captain of the Penny Street Watch, gave Dean his customary cool look and half smile of greeting.  You had to know him to recognise his most of his moods, because he had a resting face of resolute stoicism that tended to broadcast that he was seriously unimpressed by everything he saw around him.  It had taken Dean a while to recognise that while this impression was often quite genuine, it was also a very useful front for a Watch Captain to hide his real feelings behind.  He'd never mastered it himself though.

Jim Ellison was the experienced captain detailed to 'mentor' Dean during his own first days as captain at the Ropewalk Watch.  He was ex-army, as so many Watch officers were, but rumour said that he'd left the army for some unspecified medical reason rather than voluntarily retiring or being pushed out for borderline incompetence.  He'd entered the Watch as part of a two-for-one package, bringing with him his perpetual shadow, a now-senior lieutenant called Blair Sandburg who was so completely his opposite that it wasn't even funny.  Exactly where Ellison had picked up Sandburg in the first place was a mystery; it was hard to imagine _him_ in the army, and Dean had always assumed, as most people did, that Sandburg was really a Healer of some kind.  If they were fucking – which was other main rumour about them – they kept it well under wraps, and no one cared anyway because they were a tight, efficient team who got the job done.

'Gets the job done' was pretty much the highest accolade the Watch accorded their own.  No one gave them medals, after all.

Ellison saluted Dean with his mug of beer.  "Sandburg heard a rumour that Harvelle's cook was making tongue today," he said in reply to Dean's greeting.

"Uh huh."  Dean's eyes went to Ellen's chalkboard above the bar and sure enough, tongue was on the menu.  But Anaelia made tongue roughly once a month, and he seriously doubted it was reason enough for Ellison to make the trek across into the Ropewalk Watch's sector. 

The timing of this visit was a little too apt to be a coincidence, but Dean knew Ellison well enough to let it be.  The man would ask when he was good and ready.  So he flagged down Tamar behind the bar, made one of his sporadic attempts to order something stronger than ale, was thwarted by Ellen's self-imposed mission to keep him on the straight and narrow, and settled on a pint of stout instead.  It came with a plate of bread and cheese – more of Ellen's attempts to keep him sober – and a platter of the aforementioned tongue for Ellison.

"So, what's news?" Dean asked, when he judged the manly silence to have gone on for long enough.

Ellison made a non-committal sound.  "The usual.  You?"

Dean had no intention of being the one to mention the elephant in the room.  "The usual," he agreed instead.  "Today's special crazy was another serving of dancing goat, and don't try to tell me you hadn't heard about that."

Ellison smirked.  "They've heard about the dancing goat on the Karsite border, Winchester.  You charging admission yet?"

"No, I'm planning a lamb roast for Spring Festival.  Laugh it up if you like, Jim, 'cause that ain't nearly the weirdest thing I've seen this month."

"Hey, you and me both, kid."

Dean breathed a laugh.  "Yeah, right.  Lay it on me."

Ellison inclined his head.  "That's what I came to see you about.  You've a lot of people with exotic habits in your sector.  I thought you might have heard something on your grapevine about a mystery meat seller."

Dean blinked and raised his eyebrows.  He hadn't been expecting that.  "What kind of mystery meat?"

"The kind with hooves and a horn."

"If you're pulling my pigtails about the goddamned goat – "

Another blue and tan-clad body leaned heavily on the bar on Dean's other side, this one smaller and wirier and topped with a head of wild non-regulation curls to his shoulders.  "Heyla Dean, has Jim told you about the unicorn meat yet?"

He was loud and cheerful, and every eye in the tavern was immediately on him.  Ellison sighed.

"Sandburg ..."

"What?  We don't have any proof it's _not_ unicorn meat," Sandburg argued.  He turned to Dean.  "If there was gonna be unicorns anywhere, it'd be the Pelagirs, right?  This stuff's pretty heavily salted, which it'd have to be to make that kind of trip."

"It's some kind of horsemeat," Ellison said.  "It's salted to hide the fact that it's nearly rancid."  He sounded long-suffering enough that Dean could guess Sandburg had been pulling this shit for a while.  The guy had a kind of endearing and unconquerable innocence to him, which was offset by a lively sense of humour.  Part of the tag-team act the two of them occasionally ran involved Ellison good-humouredly being the straight man to Sandburg's jokester.

"Unicorns are mostly horse," Sandburg retorted irrepressibly, "and rancid is just one man's opinion.  It could be well-hung, like game, you know?"

"Sandburg, if you try to make any well-hung meat jokes in my tavern, I'll let Jo practice on you with her Bully," Ellen warned him as she stalked by.

"You heard the lady," Dean told him, pinning on a frown.  "No well-hung jokes."

"She was joking about Jo though, right?"

"Doubt it."  Dean turned back to Ellison.  "For real, some jackass is claiming to sell unicorn meat?  What the nine hells, man?  Who falls for that shit?"

"Maybe the same kind of people who buy powdered unicorn horn to make love potions and aphrodisiacs," Ellison returned with a shrug.  "Whatever it is, there's _something_ hinky about it.  We hit one shop they'd sold it to and confiscated all the goods.  The beast-healers say it's horsemeat, but ..."

"First time any of us had seen a chunk of horsemeat with striped hide on it," Sandburg chimed in.

Dean's eyebrows nearly hit his hairline  " _Striped hide?_ "

Sandburg clapped a hand to his chest.  "As the gods are my witness, man.  It had big black and white stripes, like – like an alley cat or something."

"I never heard unicorns had stripes," Dean objected.

"That's what you're going with?" Ellison asked, and Sandburg grinned.

"Well, it was that or point out that you'll never find any unicorns in _this_ part of the city," Dean retorted, and he took a swallow of his beer.

"I'm gonna regret asking why, aren't I?" Ellison said.

Dean smirked at him over the rim of his mug.  "They got a hard-on for virgins, don't they?  Good luck finding any of _those_ 'round here."

"Next person to crack a joke like that gets evicted," Ellen announced grimly, and Sandburg hastily turned his laugh into a cough.

"Don't get me evicted before I've had Anaelia's tongue," he said to Dean.  "Hers is as good as my mom's."

"Creepy, Sandburg."  Dean looked at Ellison.  "Mess with my head some more, and tell me about the stripy unicorn meat."

"Nothing much to tell, except that it wasn't cheap.  The shop was selling it under the counter, and it wasn't a back-alley establishment either.  Clientele are usually merchants and the better-off traders, people with multiple interests and a little money to burn occasionally on things like fancier foods."

Dean considered this.  The clientele explained a lot; this part of the city had little in the way of genuinely wealthy residents, and what passed for 'better off' in the Strangers Quarter was usually wishful thinking.  But the urge to indulge in the less-lean times was natural, and someone who had had a little luck, some financial successes here and there, might very well consider buying edible delicacies in celebration. 

And while buying 'unicorn steaks' might seem ridiculous on the face of it, Dean also knew that some of the foods genuinely consumed by the very rich as a status symbol were no more outlandish to the people of the lower city.  Dean knew what a peacock looked like, because he'd seen one in the Palace grounds during his brief stay at the Heralds Collegium (and suffered a severe shock after encountering it unexpectedly).  When he'd described the bird to Ellen and some of her customers they'd been agog, not least because they'd only ever heard rumours of such a creature before and then solely in terms of it being _something noblemen ate at banquets._   At least some of them were still convinced Dean had been winding them up.

Put like that, it wasn't hard to imagine some poor, gullible mutt being sold a parcel of drastically overpriced horsemeat and being none the wiser.  In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Dean found the really interesting part of Ellison and Sandburg's story to be the striped hide.  Horses - and indeed ponies, donkeys and mules - came in a wide variety of colours and patterns, but he'd never heard of any of them having stripes of the type Sandburg had described.  If an accredited beast-healer said that it was horsemeat, then they had to accept that of course, but that left two possibilities.

"Someone's either dyeing the hide, or they've got their hands on something that looks a lot like a horse but isn't," he decided.

Ellison inclined his head.  "That's what I'm thinking.  I'm also thinking you're better placed to track them down.  I'm an outsider here really."  Which was true.  He was well-respected, because he was ex-army and had a reputation for scrupulous honesty, but his background was solid merchant class and he'd received a better education than most people Dean knew in the Watch.

Dean nodded.  "I'll tell my people to keep an ear to the ground.  Wouldn't be the first food scam we've had to break up.  Remember the smoked oysters?"

"What did those things turn out to be in the end?" Ellen asked from behind the bar.  She'd been listening in on their conversation as she served other customers.

"Mostly lumps of cheese so old they were practically fossilised," Sandburg replied, grimacing.  "Some of them were pickled jerky of some kind ... pretty nasty."

"I had real Evendim oysters once," Ellison said thoughtfully.  "When I was still a corporal in the Guard – we were posted to Zoë at the time."  He shrugged.  "Never saw what the big deal was.  By the time they were cooked, it was like chewing on an old boot."

Sandburg was staring at him in a kind of pained fascination.  "I think you're supposed to eat them raw."

"Eating those things raw would kill you," Ellison advised him.  "Never eat shellfish raw unless you pull it out of the water yourself and eat it right there and then.  And it could still kill you if the water's tainted."  He shook his head.  "Give me a decent steak pie any day."

"A good smoked oyster'll get yer rod up like nothing else, young man," one of Ellen's elderly customers piped up from the nearest table.  "Ye young fools with yer regulations an' ordnances – the day'll come when ye'll be looking for a cure for Man's Droop, an' ye'll be sorry ye confiscated those oysters!"

"I really won't," Dean told him.

"Oysters bedamned!" another old man said.  "What you's needin' is tincture of Pelagir fly, boy!  There's a 'pothecary I can give you the name of, if you's havin' problems."

"Be better wastin' yer money on a massage at Mama Tulip's house," a third voice opined.  "She'll get ye up in no time, an' she don't charge extra for a cuppa tea!"

"She don' charge extra for th' tea, 'cause it knocks ye out for a candlemark!" the first man retorted.  "Ain't ye never wondered why there's no man can tell ye what crossin' 'er river's like?"

"I know what _I'm_ wondering, and that's when one of you cheap-jacks is going to pay your slate!" Ellen said loudly, and the argument swerved into a frantic discussion of finances.  Ellen smiled grimly, but pitched her voice lower for the three Watch officers.  "I heard the same thing about Mama Tulip's."

"There's no law against charging a silver royal for a cup of tea," Ellison said mildly.

Ellen scowled.  "Maybe there _should_ be, if it lays a man out for a candlemark and robs him of his memory _and_ the contents of his purse.  What the hell is she feeding them?  They only go there for a massage."

"No they don't," Dean said, "and when some of 'em get a massage and nothing else, they get nasty.  Mama Tulip's a tiny little thing."  He sighed.  "But you're right.  Maybe she's just trying to make sure they can't get out of hand with her, but if she doesn't watch it someone's gonna end up poisoned.  I'll have a word with her."

"You can drop by Ras Flesher's and ask him about unicorns, while you're at it," Ellen added.

Dean raised his eyebrows at her.  "Ellen, if you want back in the uniform, all you gotta do is ask."

"I've a bar to run," she huffed irritably.

"And we've a Watch House to run," Ellison said, pushing his empty platter away and standing up.  "You done, Sandburg?"

"Done?  I haven't even started - "

"Then you'd better get it to go, hadn't you?"

"Two minutes," Sandburg grumbled, and he disappeared through the door into the kitchen.

Dean shook his head, amused, then caught the look Ellison was giving him.  "What?"

"What were you planning to do if that ass at HQ had really fired you?" Ellison asked.

Too much to hope that he would forget that.  "No idea.  Ask me another."

"Would you have come and told me?"

"No idea," Dean gritted out.  "I hadn't got to thinking that far ahead."  Which was true.

"Then I'll save you the brain-power," Ellison said easily.  "If someone goes after you like that another time, you come to me.  Or Bobby Singer, but my contacts are better."

Dean squinted at him.  "Were they ripping off your crew's wages too?"

"Nope."

"Huh."

"They picked their victims pretty carefully."

"So I heard," Dean said sourly.  Ellison was, admittedly, nobody's idea of a victim. Another thought intruded.  "So ... you got Heralds on your back too?"

Ellison's smile held a hint of sly amusement.  "No, I think that's your special burden, Winchester."

 

xXx

 

The conversation with Mama Tulip went about as well as Dean had expected.  He had some sympathy with her, for unlike most 'masseuses' in his sector she genuinely _was_ a masseuse, not a prostitute, which led to misunderstandings with some of her clients.  And she was, it had to be said, a more refined type of person than was generally found in the part of the Strangers Quarter where she rented rooms, which increased the potential for the 'wrong' type of client. 

Tulip claimed to be a widow, fallen on hard times after her much older husband had died and left her with nothing.  According to one of Dean's informants this was all true apart from the widowhood; she had been the expensive mistress of the man in question, and the true widow had briskly cut off financial support to her after his death.

She was a tiny, frail-looking woman of an uncertain age, with golden skin, dark almond-shaped eyes, and straight blue-black hair; Tulip was almost certainly not her real name.  Dean had no idea where her ancestors hailed from, and although he had seen a handful of other people in Haven who looked like her, they all lived in the upper city.  Supposedly she had a daughter, who worked at the Palace and provided additional financial support, but no one was able to verify this.

The conversation with Tulip involved a long (and largely unhelpful) explanation of the noble history of sacred temple massage among her people.  Dean could think of a few people he knew who would be fascinated by her story.  He was not one of them, because in the end it still boiled down to him having to remind her that doping people with soporific tea to keep them from getting randy and aggressive could end with some very unpleasant consequences, both for her and for her clients. 

He chose not to touch on Ellen's allegations that Tulip stole from her clients while they were under the influence of her tea, because he had no other evidence of this and so far no one had made a formal complaint about it, but they ended by agreeing that his constables would present a stronger presence in the area, to deter anyone with retribution on their mind, and hopefully that would also deter Tulip from any larcenous impulses she might be harbouring.

Not an entirely satisfactory result, but Dean was used to that in his line of work.

He also opted to ignore Ellen's other suggestion about visiting Ras Flesher, but that was mostly because he wanted to run the whole 'unicorn meat' scam past Jody and Henryks before he decided which of the butchers in his sector to look at.

Their initial reaction was much like his own; disbelief and exasperation, followed by a nauseated homage paid to the good ol' days of the smoked oyster scam.  Jody, ever reliable, put her finger on the one thing that had bugged Dean about the story from the start.

"Cap'n Ellison's saying the meat's bad and salted to hide it," she commented.  "That doesn't scream 'luxury goods' to me.  Granted, there's plenty of chop-houses and cauponas around who'll take bad meat and ask no questions, but _they're_ not going to be selling unicorn steaks to the stupid.  What'd be the point?  None of their customers are going to have extra coin to spare for fancies, and most of them won't even ask what the meat is to start with."

"And none of the better eating houses are going to take bad meat from someone they don't know," Henryks added.  "They all know their suppliers, and they have a reasonable idea where the goods are coming from.  You're not telling me Ellen would buy meat without knowing the name of the butcher who cut its throat."

Dean nodded.  "Which makes me wonder if we're dealing with two different scams here.  Someone genuinely selling some kind of meat to the better dealers, and someone selling off the crap ends to the smaller fry when it's gone past its best."  He frowned.  "Does any of this sound likely to you?"

"Not on the face of it," Henryks said, "but I've seen a lot of unlikely things since I joined the Watch."

"Ain't that the truth," Jody said wryly.

"There any evidence this is happening in our sector?"

"Nothing so far," Dean acknowledged.  "Jim Ellison asked me to keep an eye out because we've a lot of folk here who wistfully remember eating, I don't know, spit-roasted firebird or some such shit back in the old country and wouldn't mind having a taste of it again."

They paused, considering this.

"Guess the question has to be asked," Jody said finally.  " _Do_ unicorns really exist?"

She and Henryks looked at Dean expectantly.  He scowled.

"They gave me a set of bars when I got this job," he said, "not one of those books with a list of weird-ass animals in it.  How should I know if the damn things exist?  Sandburg said the hide had stripes on it – that sound like a unicorn to you?"

Henryks looked thoughtful.  "There's a lot of horse-types in the world.  Just because there's not much variety _here_ doesn't mean there isn't something like that somewhere else.  Lemme ask my _buya_ about it – she came here from the far south in a merchant caravan.  She might know something."

"That'd be great – thanks," Dean said, genuinely pleased with even this fragile line of enquiry.  Knowing what beast the meat came from might offer a possible lead to a source.  "And give her my best wishes, yeah?  Her headache powders are the only thing keeping me going some days."

Henryks gave him a knowing look.  "You want me to score you some more when I see her?  You've been taking a lot lately."

Too much to hope that this had gone unnoticed.  "I'm good for now, thanks," Dean told him.

"You ought to see someone about those headaches," Jody commented.

"Don't worry, I am."  That was stretching the truth, and that it was actually exacerbating the problem, not alleviating it, was something they didn't need to know, any more than they needed to know the true cause of his headaches.  "So – you guys remind your crews to keep a sharp lookout for this stuff, all right?  Along with everything else we gotta look out for."

"Sure, what's one more job when all's said and done?" Jody said amiably.  "My lot have broken up five domestics in three days.  Fake unicorn kebabs'll make a nice change."

 

xXx

 

The upshot of this was a sudden surge in people being picked up for selling bad and borderline-bad food, which didn't generate any leads on Ellison's mystery meat dealer, but – as Dean philosophically noted - a day when people were not being sold food that could kill them was always a moderately good day, even if it meant him spending a lot of his time in the magistrates' court ensuring that the perpetrators were shown the error of their ways.

Ten days after the initial conversation with Ellison, Dean encountered a runner from the Penny Street Watch House who breathlessly requested his presence in that Watch's sector, compliments of Captain Ellison, etcetera etcetera.

"I thought you might want to see this," Ellison told him, when Dean arrived at the Healing Temple the girl had guided him to.  This Temple had a section for beast-healing, and it didn't take a genius to work out why the two Watch Captains – and Sandburg - were there.

"You found your unicorn," Dean guessed, a little flippantly.

"No, we found a Celestial Tortoise," Ellison corrected him, unamused.

"A what now?"

Ellison looked at him.  "Do you know what a tortoise is, Winchester?"

Dean frowned.  "Sure.  It's that thing the army do with their shields to get past a bank of archers."

Ellison sighed.

"Well, he's not wrong," Sandburg pointed out.

"It's an animal," Ellison explained patiently.  "That's what the army formation is named after."

"Actually, it's a reptile," Sandburg said helpfully.  "Four scaly limbs, head and tail, hard rounded shell surrounding the body.  The Celestial Tortoise is kind of a god, though.  A couple of religions worship it – supposedly it carries the world on its back."

Dean stared at them for a moment.  "Someone's claiming to be selling the meat of a divine animal?"

"Exactly."

"And is it really tortoise meat?"

"No," the beast-healer said.  She was a petite woman with a mass of curly red hair and a grim expression. 

She dumped a bundled up length of rough sack-cloth on a table and unfolded it to reveal half a dozen hunks of some kind of flesh.  It smelled fairly bad, but Dean held his breath and took a closer look.  One of the lumps had a patch of scaly skin still attached to it.

"It's snake," the beast-healer said.  "A pretty big one, which is worrying.  Not native to Valdemar."

"No shit," Dean said.  The size of the lumps made his skin crawl.  "How big are we talking here?"

"Based on this?  I'm not an expert, but if it follows the usual proportions of snakes then ... maybe four or five feet long."

Ellison was pinching the bridge of his nose in weary dismay, but Dean looked at Sandburg and he was pretty sure they were both on the same page, which was to say - _horrified_.

"I don't get this," Dean said.  He was conscious that his tone sounded vaguely outraged, but that was fine because vaguely outraged was the least of what he was feeling.  "It'd be weird enough if someone was offering up snake meat for sale, let alone a snake this size.  But why go to all the trouble of calling it _mythical tortoise meat?_   What the hell is the point?!"

"You got anyone in your sector who'd eat snake if they were offered it?" Ellison asked him dryly.

"Sure.  Some of 'em eat fried snails and crickets dipped in honey, so why not?"

"I'm just thinking that if you offered most people snake to eat, they'd run screaming.  But if you offer them the meat of a legendary animal that's a symbol of divinity and strength ...?"

Dean squinted at him for a moment, but he had to admit it made some sense.  If people were prepared to eat pickled lumps of something that might once have been cheese, or drink crushed bugs in honey-ale, in the belief that they could make a man virile, then yes – they would definitely eat meat of dubious provenance for similar reasons.

"There are plenty of stories out there about how consuming the flesh of a physically superior animal confers that strength on the eater," Sandburg said in a subdued tone.  "I travelled a lot with my mom when I was a little, and in some places there are historical records of warriors eating the flesh of a conquered enemy for the same reason.  I can think of a dozen stories where the hero has to catch and eat a divine animal – a fish, a bull, you name it – to obtain knowledge and power."

"Which gives us a reason for idiots being duped into eating this shit," Dean snapped.  "It doesn't explain where the hell someone got hold of a job lot of stripy horsemeat and a dead snake the size of a teenage girl."

"Can you tell if the snake died of natural causes?" Sandburg asked the beast-healer.

She made a face.  "With just a few chunks of it to go on?  No!"

"Why is that relevant?" Dean asked.

"Well, there's a reason animals like this aren't native to Valdemar," Sandburg said, with a shrug.  "Reptiles are cold-blooded – they need heat.  Small ones get by this far north, but they don't grow to any size because it's just not warm enough here for most of the year.  So this snake _could_ have died from natural causes – right?"  He looked at the beast-healer, who shrugged.

"Probably.  I'm not an expert on reptiles."

"What are you thinking?" Ellison asked curiously.

"I'm thinking maybe it died because someone didn't know how to take care of it."

"But why was it here in the first place?" Dean demanded.

"I don't know, man, I'm just throwing out ideas here!  Maybe someone wanted it for their menagerie."

"Now you're just using the big words because you can," Dean grumbled.  "What's a menagerie?"

"A collection of rare animals," the beast-healer said.  "Rich people have them.  But I never heard of one in Valdemar with giant snakes."

"Sounds like the kind of thing some fool with more money than sense would want," Ellison said sourly, "just to be able to say they had it."

"That's kind of the point with menageries," she said, shrugging.  "What do you want me to do with this stuff, Captain?"

Ellison considered.  "Jot me down some notes on the size and your observations," he said, "and incinerate the meat.  Keep an ear to the ground and let me know if anything else unusual turns up."

"Will do."

"And copy in Captain Winchester please."

"So what next?" Dean asked, as they walked out into the Temple courtyard.  "Just an observation, Jim, but so far all of these cases are turning up in your sector, not mine."

"Yeah, and I'd like to know why.  I still think the obvious customers for this stuff are in the Strangers Quarter, not here."

"If these animals are coming from someone's menagerie, how do we deal with it?" Sandburg wanted to know.  "The Watch's jurisdiction doesn't reach that far."

"Technically it does, but you're right – I wouldn't want to try it without back-up," Ellison admitted.

"Worth taking it to the Herald's Court?" Dean suggested.

"Not without a lot more evidence.  District Command'll have my skin if I try it."  But Ellison was giving Dean a very meaningful look, and Dean wasn't stupid.

He huffed a little and rolled his eyes.  "I'll keep my ear to the ground and tap all my sources," he said.  "I'll let you know if I hear anything useful."

"You do that," Ellison said amiably.

 

xXx

 

The Penny Street Watch stood on one side of Dean's sector; on the other was the Pieman's Yard Watch, and when Dean wanted to have a quiet, semi-anonymous drink or meal – or to meet up with someone with a reasonable degree of privacy – he crossed over the boundary to one of the mid-range taverns in Pieman's Yard's jurisdiction.  He could still get recognised, because he had those kind of looks, but generally speaking the people there were less interested in him.

So he strolled into the Bell and Broom that evening with no more notice taken than a passing nod from the innkeeper.  Dean had a table he preferred, in a nook to one side that had clear sight-lines in all three directions.  When he slid into his seat, someone was already sitting on the other side of the nook, giving all his attention to what admittedly looked like a very nicely-baked meat pie.  Dean ignored him for the moment, in favour of flagging down one of the middle-aged serving women and ordering a mug of home-brewed and a plate of sausages.  (Nicely-baked or not, Dean generally preferred his pies to be sweet).

It was only after the meal had been delivered that his table companion raised his head and acknowledged him with a mild lift of his eyebrows.  He was dressed in nondescript workday clothes covered by a rusty black robe that might, to the casual observer, be taken for a city scribe's robe.

Dean wasn't a casual observer, and the corner of his mouth twitched in spite of himself.  "Every time I see you it takes me a couple minutes to realise it's you.  How do you do that?  It can't just be the clothes."

Herald Kolsen smiled faintly.  "But they do help.  And I have a very ordinary sort of face, you have to admit."

"You would have made a great master criminal."

"I considered it when I was young, but my mother raised me to be honest."  He sounded quite serious, which was entertaining.

"Yeah?  How'd that work out for you?"

Kolsen's expression turned wry for a moment.  "Not as well as you might think.  I do regret it occasionally.  Surprised?"

"I've decided it's safer if I don't let anything about you surprise me," Dean drawled, and Kolsen chuckled.

"I'll bear that in mind.  How are you, Dean?"

"If you must know, the headaches are a bitch.  People are starting to notice all the willowbark tea I'm drinking."  Dean dug into his sausages with an appetite; the Bell and Broom's cook made them herself, and she spiced them liberally.  It was a flavour reminiscent of his childhood.

Kolsen nodded.  "It's no consolation, I know, but that _will_ get better.  You'll acclimatise eventually.  The kind of crash course we had to give you runs pretty contrary to normal training rules, and it doesn't help that you have to manage in this part of the city.  Your shields must be getting quite a workout."

"I've slipped up a couple of times," Dean admitted.  "Not as much fun as it ought to be."

"You might be holding onto them too tightly," Kolsen advised him.  "That makes slips more unpleasant, and it'll make the headache worse.  Try to relax a little – practice loosening them when you're on your own, somewhere reasonably quiet.  It's actually better sometimes to let a small amount of mental 'noise' through, so that you can get used to it.  Plus you can get a feel for what's 'normal' and learn to recognise what isn't."

"Yeah, that's easier said than done.  I let 'em go too far and everyone around me starts getting the heebie-jeebies."

"That's because you panic when it happens," Kolsen said, "and then everyone panics with you.  The first rule of managing any Gift is to remain calm."

Dean sighed.

"You're doing very well," Kolsen told him.  "Much better than any of us expected, if I'm honest."

"Well, it not like I can get rid of it, so I just gotta deal.  Don't I?"

"That's all any of us can do."  Kolsen changed the subject.  "How are things with your Watch?  Aside from the dancing goat, whose fame, I have to warn you, is spreading far and wide."

"Has anyone seen the damn goat dance yet, is what _I_ want to know," Dean grumbled.  "All I've seen of her so far is her shaggy butt wandering in and out of our lock-up.  But there's something you could maybe help with."

"I'm all ears," Kolsen said agreeably, "but bear in mind that I have to be careful how far I poke my nose into the minutiae of Watch business, because I'm supposed to focus on the bigger picture."

"It's more like information," Dean said.  He munched a link of sausage for a moment, his eyes wandering idly over the tavern's other patrons.  No one was paying them any mind.  "You know a lot of the rich folks and nobles, right?"

"Unfortunately."

"Do many of them collect rare animals?"

Kolsen's eyebrows twitched upwards in surprise.  "I believe a few do.  It's not common though – the tax on importing livestock from other kingdoms is fairly steep.  Not many merchants bother, the cost of the import duties on top of the transport and care of the creatures makes bringing them this far north less than viable, unless they have a guaranteed buyer.  Why do you ask?"

Dean shrugged.  "Someone's been selling unicorn meat in the Penny Street sector."

" _Meat?_   Not horn?"

"Meat," Dean confirmed, pleased with Kolsen's startled expression.  "Oh, and meat from the Celestial Tortoise."

"I don't know what that is."

"It's a religious thing.  People worship it.  I was thinking about that earlier, and it could turn pretty nasty."

"If you try to sell it to the wrong person, I should think it could," Kolsen agreed dryly.  "Just as offering cuts of the Virgin Huntress's left buttock for sale is unlikely to prove a sound business model."

Dean knew it was bad to laugh at this, but it had been a long day and he was starting to feel a little punchy.  Plus there was a mischievous look in Kolsen's eyes that belied his sober expression.

"I'm assuming we don't believe it's really unicorn or tortoise meat?"

"It's some kind of horse and snake."

"It's not illegal to sell either," Kolsen commented.

"No, but the stuff that's been turning up is pretty rancid.  And it's not _just_ horse or snake.  The beast-healer says the snake was seriously big-ass – like, five feet long – "

"I hope that's an exaggeration."

"I _wish._   The horsemeat came from something with black and white stripes."

Kolsen was silent for several minutes, leaving Dean to finish his sausages.

"I do know that it's possible for snakes to grow to that size," he said finally, "because I saw some very large snakes in captivity once, although not in Valdemar.  I don't recognise the description of the horse, but I have some contacts who might be able to identify it.  I take it you and the captain of the Penny Street Watch – Ellison? – think this meat came from animals kept in captivity at some point?"

Dean shrugged.  "It's just a theory.  Honestly, we got nothing else right now."

"It's a reasonable theory though.  If I find anything out, I'll let you know."

"Appreciated."

"I should get back," Kolsen said with a sigh.  He pushed his empty plate aside, pulled out a money pouch and put a few coins on the table by his empty tankard.  "Consider what I said about loosening your shields – I think you'll find it'll help.  And Dean ..."

Dean blinked at him as he stood up.  "Yeah?"

Kolsen gave him a kindly look.  "Have a care how many headache remedies you take.  They're not a permanent answer, and if you take too much they could make you seriously ill."

"I hear that," Dean said, "but I gotta be able to work, y'know?"

"The headache is mostly tension.  Try something else to relieve it."

"My landlady'll kick my butt if I start drinking again.  Besides, getting drunk just makes it harder to hold the shields."

"I was thinking of something you don't ingest," Kolsen said wryly.  "Alcohol isn't an answer either, believe me.  Maybe a massage?"

Dean had a brief flashback to his conversation with Mama Tulip, and made a face.  "I'll think about it."

A little while later, he dimmed the lamp in his room back at the Roadhouse Inn, stretched out on his bed and stared up at the soot-stained rafters above his head, trying to relax.  It wasn't something that came easily to him, especially as the longer he lay there, the more conscious he became of the noise from the taproom below.  Even his breathing seemed louder than usual, exaggerated by the dull pulsing ache in his skull bones. 

His cat Baby jumped up onto the bed, making him jerk in surprise, and settled down beside him.  She spent a few minutes washing her paws, face and ears, before curling up neatly and tucking herself under his left hand.  A rumbling purr started moments later.

And just like that, the noise retreated to the background where it belonged, and Dean's muscles began to unlock one by one.  He let out a shaky breath of relief as the pain in his head eased a little.

_Alternatively, just spend time with a cat,_ he thought vaguely in Kolsen's direction.  Gingerly, he tried to loosen his hold on his mental shields.  It was difficult and uncomfortable because while Gifts like his own were rare, total mind-blindness was even rarer in the Valdemaran population.  To someone with as strong a Mindspeaking Gift as Dean, opening up his shields was like standing in the middle of a busy street on market day.  It was almost impossible to pick up on anything specific without deliberately trying to focus in any one direction, but the collective 'noise' was overwhelming.

And Dean had learned very quickly that he didn't want to know what was going on in most people's heads.  He'd been warned at the Collegium that anything he uncovered by using his Gift would be inadmissible in court; the law only allowed evidence of that kind to be given by Heralds.  But for the most part what he accidentally 'overheard' was incomprehensible and the concept of mental discipline was apparently a myth.  Most people, he found, had some kind of monologue constantly going on inside their heads, and not even a running monologue at that – they jumped from thought to thought, held conversations with themselves, turned things over repetitively, told themselves stories, repeated the same verses of a song over and over, and interrupted themselves constantly to notice something and pass private comment on it.

Admittedly, there had been a handful of occasions when Dean had been in a quiet place – such as his office at the Watch House, when most of his constables were out on patrol – and accidentally overheard someone like Jody.  Jody was a good example, because she was a quiet person and he'd discovered that quiet people were often the busiest inside their heads.

Jody had a running commentary going on when she wasn't talking, and it was hilariously sarcastic.  Dean had had no idea that she thought of all the men in the Ropewalk Watch as "sweetpea" and "princess" when they annoyed her.  And they annoyed her a _lot_.

Of course, once he knew that he'd had a hard time stopping himself calling people sweetpea too.  He kept a sharp watch on his shields around her after that, because he preferred not to know for sure if she referred to him the same way.

Talk about a double-edged sword.

'Listening' to the mental chatter of Ellen's customers was significantly less entertaining.  For the most part it was even boring.  Drunks didn't have much mental coherency, and the few that did were thinking things that were not good for Dean's stress levels.  He couldn't go down there and punch out every asshole who was thinking crude thoughts about the women who ran the Roadhouse, after all, but he wanted to.  Oh, did he want to.  Especially the guy who was currently musing on what he'd like to do to Ellen's young laundry-maid and general helper, Podina, and justifying it to himself – if that was the right term – because she was 'a cripple and would probably be grateful for the attention'.

Dean gritted his teeth. 

_The thought is not the deed,_ Herald Ansel's quiet voice emphasised in his memory.  _It's vital you remember that.  All of us are prey to thoughts sometimes that we could hardly be proud of.  The vast majority of people never act on their baser thoughts.  Is it ugly?  Of course.  But if we hanged every man who dreamed of destroying his enemies, we'd have to hang ourselves for our joking threats to murder the person who repeatedly forgets to pick up their dirty laundry from the floor of the bathing room._

For all her shyness, Podina was well able to defend herself from drunken assholes, and had done so on more than one occasion.  And it wasn't as though she was alone down there.  It was a pretty good bet that Ellen already had her eye on the asshole in question and was getting ready to toss him out into the street if he made a move.  If he took exception to that, there were plenty of regulars who would be more than happy to step in and help teach him the error of his ways.

Nobody needed Dean Winchester charging in there like a bull at a gate.

Said asshole finished his pot of ale, concluded that grabbing Podina in a dark corner was unlikely to be successful, and irritably decided to go home and bother his wife instead.

Dean's jaw unclenched and he let out a slow breath.  Baby's rusty purr pushed out all the other wisps of mental chatter, and somehow he managed to relax again.

"Ground and centre."  He whispered the core tenet of good shield management to himself, trying to visualise the solid earth beneath his feet even though he was currently two storeys up with his feet propped on a folded blanket.  "Ground and centre ..."

 

xXx

 

" _Buya_ says the stripy unicorn sounds like a Quagga or a Zeebru," Henryks told Dean the next day, "and neither of them has a horn.  She says it sounds more like Zeebru though, 'cause they're black and white.  Quagga are brown and only have stripes on the shoulders and neck."

"Huh.  All right."  Dean considered this.  "Do people eat them?"

Henryks snorted.  "She said no one she knew would eat them, but that's because folk from her village weren't crazy enough to waste time chasing a damn herd of Zeebru 'round the grasslands when they had a perfectly good herd of hogs at home."

"Hey, fair comment.  Gimme pork over horsemeat any day."

"But she added that there's no telling what crazy rich folk'll do when they're bored."

"Also fair comment," Dean said dryly.  "Thanks, man.  At least we can put a name to it now." 

For all the good that would do.  Interestingly, when he went to his office there was a sealed note from Herald Kolsen waiting for him.

 

_My source suggests that the striped horse-like animal could be a "Zebra", although they gave a caveat that they have never seen one personally. It's a pony-like creature with black and white stripes all over its body.  According to my source it's known to live in the Yellow Savannah region of southern Velvar – south-east of the Dhorisha Plains._

_As yet I have no information on how such an animal could have come to Valdemar, let alone how one ended up as a food item in the lower city.  I'll continue to make discreet enquiries, and keep you informed._

 

"Zebra" was close enough to "Zeebru" for Dean to conclude that they were the same animal.  He was as bemused as Kolsen as to why one – or more – were in Valdemar, though.  It didn't take much imagination to come up with schemes for getting it across the border without it being seen; it couldn't be difficult to temporarily camouflage the distinctive coat with some kind of dye.  But getting it this far north in the first place?  That literally meant herding it the length of the continent, an impossibly lengthy and expensive journey by anyone's standards. 

Especially for it to end up on a plate in lower city chophouse.

Shaking his head, he despatched a note with the information to Jim Ellison, and set about preparing for the rest of his shift.  He had a full – ahem! – plate that day, and as usual not nearly enough time to do it all in.

In fact, it was a frustrating sort of morning.  As expected, not one of the butchers in the Ropewalk Watch's sector claimed to know anything about any meat of dubious provenance.  This came as very little surprise to the Watch, because for reasons of health butchers and fishmongers were more tightly regulated and inspected than other victuallers in the city.  Most of them were family businesses that had been operating for generations and wouldn't put their reputations and livelihoods at risk, however small or humble their business might be.

The inns, chophouses, cauponas and food stalls were another matter.  They also claimed to know nothing of any dodgy meat, of course, which in some cases was so improbable, based on what the Watch already knew of them, that it would have been funny had there been any constables left with a sense of humour on the subject.  Jo Harvelle was particularly aggrieved.  She was the Watch House rookie, and everyone in the sector knew it, which meant that she was always the first butt of a joke.

"If one more person tries to tell me about chasing their grandma's four-legged chicken 'round the yard, I am _not_ gonna be responsible for what I do," she fumed, when she returned to the Watch House at midday.

"Did any of them explain how the chicken got four legs in the first place?" Ash, Dean's scribe, asked her brightly.

"I will hurt you," she told him fiercely, "and then I'll get Mom to inspect your rooms."

Ash lived at the Roadhouse, and the women employed by Ellen flipped a coin once a week to decide who would be unlucky enough to clean his rooms.  Every once in a while things got bad enough that they would jointly complain and Ellen would perform an inspection, which was usually followed by threats of eviction if he didn't curtail some of his activities.

He winced.  "Sheesh ... just asking."

"They always told me it was eight legs, because the chicken was bred with a spider," Dean commented, by way of consolation.

Jo squinted at him, and just beyond his shields he could 'hear' her trying to work out how such a thing would work.  It was amusing, but he tightened his shields up again just in case.

"How do folk even think of this stuff?" she demanded finally, disgusted.

Dean made a face.  "Don't look at me.  My people have folk stories about mares that got raped by drunken soldiers and gave birth to centaurs – and that's just the _tame_ stuff.  Don't even ask about the guy who ripped out his sister's unborn baby and ate it.  Come on, Ash.  Mustn't keep the District Commander waiting."

"I want to know about the guy who ate his sister's baby now," Ash said, as they walked through the streets.

"He offended Bel, the great goddess, and she cursed him.  The baby grew into a gargoyle inside his belly that ate its way through all his organs, and ended up chewing its way out of the back of his head."

Ash considered this unenthusiastically, before nodding.  "Got it.  Don't piss off the goddess by eating your nieces and nephews."

"Words to live by, buddy."

"Why'd he eat the baby anyway?"

Dean shrugged.  "Thought it'd make him more powerful, and no, I don't know why.  Weird shit always happens in stories."

"Weird shit happens in this city too," Ash observed amiably, and really, Dean couldn't argue with that.

Still ...  "If you're planning to give birth to a centaur, don't call me."

"That's gotta hurt," Ash said, after pondering this for a few minutes.

"What part of giving birth doesn't?"  Dean felt he could be pardoned for being a little sensitive about this.  A few days before he'd been kept awake for most of the night by a woman in the next street giving birth.  Her thoughts on the subject had been ... _educational_ , to say the least.

Mercifully, the offices of their district's Command hove into view and Dean braced himself instead for the monthly torture that was the meeting the Watch Captains had with their District Commander.  He was particularly not looking forward to this session, as he suspected he was going to be asked to account for the fires in his sector.  While that situation had been resolved satisfactorily (for a very specific value of "satisfactorily"), accounting for it would be another matter entirely.  Having to do so in front of all the other Watch Captains from his quadrant added another layer of joy, with an extra salty topping of uncertainty about whether the Commander knew the true story in all its gory details or not.

One thing was for sure; no matter what the District Commander knew, Dean was _not_ going to be telling the true story in front of all his peers.  They would be getting the abridged version, the one that didn't involve the Winchester boys getting possessed by a demon.

"You think Captain Ellison's gonna have to tell everyone about the unicorn meat?" Ash asked as they climbed the steps to the Command building.

Dean suddenly felt marginally happier.  At least he wasn't going to be the only one with an unbelievable story to recount today.

But one thing no one could ever accuse Jim Ellison of being was an unreliable witness.  He exuded calm, level-headed authority from every pore, a trait that Dean heartily envied, especially when it came to recounting the everyday lunacy that was a Watch Captain's life in the lower quadrant of Haven.  Anyone else relating the unicorn meat story would have got at least a couple of muffled snorts from his fellow captains.  The worst Ellison had to deal with was some hard side-eyeing from Bobby Singer, and for someone who worked with Blair Sandburg on a daily basis this was no challenge to his composure at all.

It helped, of course, that the new District Commander viewed the introduction of a potential contaminated meat issue into their district with something less than amusement.  She wanted regular updates on the situation, not just from Ellison but also from Dean, in spite of him stressing that so far there was no evidence that the Strangers Quarter was involved.

Then it was on to the mystery fires, which the Commander summarised in such a way that Dean received his first notification that the official line was 'troubled, Gifted teenager now in the custody of the Palace Guard'.  He managed to look as though this was old news to him, even if it came as an interesting surprise to everyone else, and accepted the relayed gratitude of the Palace Guard and Heraldic Circle for his assistance with becoming modesty – and some inner discomfort, given that the truth was a very different story.

One fellow captain was not as surprised as the others, however. 

"Having that teenager under lock and key at the palace must be quite a relief for you," Bela Talbot commented to Dean, when they all took a brief break for tea.

Dean was inclined to distrust Bela by default, but the remark seemed innocuous enough so he cautiously agreed.

"Awkward situation though," she pursued, and although her tone was sympathetic there was a glint of amusement in her eyes that didn't reassure him at all.  "If people found out, it could be very uncomfortable for you."

Not for the first time, Dean wondered just who Bela had in her pocket who fed her titbits of useful information on just about anything and everything.  On this occasion the thought was accompanied by a tiny stab of alarm and disbelief, because the idea that she knew the truth was actually a little frightening – not just that she knew _the truth_ , which was alarming enough, but how she had found it out.  That she could have a spy in the palace, in the Heraldic Circle even, was ... well, not entirely impossible perhaps, but it seemed incredibly unlikely.

Of course, she could just be fishing.

"What do you mean by that?" Dean asked her flatly, deciding to take the bull by the horns.  Anything Bela said on the subject here was a risk, after all, because the District Commander had just demonstrated both that she knew the true story and that she was quite happy to go along with the cover-up of it.

"I heard that the teenager in question is one of your brothers," Bela replied, a smile beginning to curl the corner of her mouth.

"Yeah?  Well you heard wrong," Dean told her.  "Sammy and Adam are right where they're supposed to be, takin' their classes.  And if they're not, I want to know the reason why, 'cause we had words about that while I was at the palace."

She didn't seem to be in the least disconcerted by this.  "Very good, Dean," she told him, amused.  "Keep saying it nice and firmly like that and I'm sure even you'll start to believe it."

Dean put his teacup down.  "You got a problem with my family, Bela?  They're gonna be back here for Spring Festival if you want to take it up with all three of us together."

That just seemed to amuse her more, and she patted his shoulder kindly.  "Don't get so excited, darling, I'm just twisting your tail!  After a whole week at the palace I was a little surprised you didn't get measured up for a pretty white uniform, but perhaps you're not quite ready for that, hm?"

Dean wrestled his aggravation under control with an effort, and even managed a false smile for her.  "You'll have to take that up with the Companions, but me – I'm happy right where I am."

"Of course you are."  Bela handed him his teacup rather pointedly.  "Whatever happened to that priest you had staying with you, the one who got Chosen?  Did you see much of him while you were at the palace?"

"No I didn't."  Which was the truth, but it made Dean's stomach drop unpleasantly all the same.

He'd been suppressing all thoughts of Castiel quite successfully until Bela mentioned him.

"You surprise me.  I thought the two of you had become friends."  Still with the sympathetic tone, still with the barely-concealed amusement.  "Wasn't he living with you until his horsie came and carried him off?"

"Yeah, and if you get a lead on where the bastard is now, let me know because he stiffed me for his half of the rent."  And that, of course, was a lie, but Dean felt justifiably proud of exasperated note in his voice when he said it, because it surprised a snort of what sounded like genuine laughter from Bela in response.

"No, darling, you're on your own with that!"

"Story of my life."

For a split second, seeing her eyes stray towards other conversations going on around the room, Dean considered dropping his shields and trying to listen in on Bela's thoughts.  He desperately wanted to know what had prompted this exchange and what she knew about the true story of the fires in Haven and the Winchester boys' involvement.

But then the District Commander called them all to order again, and he returned to his seat at the table with a certain amount of relief.  It was just as well that he hadn't had the time to do anything.  Something told him that Bela had been waiting for it.

The reports continued, with one captain reporting a sudden spate of roofwalking incidents that looked to be the work of a large and organised gang, while Bela detailed an ongoing problem with vandalism in her sector, and Bobby requested assistance in handling a suspected child prostitution ring.  Child exploitation was, horribly, a perennial problem in the lower city and in the Exiles Gate sector in particular, and they were just getting into a discussion of possible new strategies for handling it when the door into the room opened just enough to admit a tiny Watch runner, who scuttled over to Dean as unobtrusively as she could manage and whispered a message that brought him up with a jolt.

"Captain Winchester?" the Commander said pointedly.  "Is there a problem?"

"Yes ma'am."  Dean was already getting to his feet and indicating to Ash that he should take his place and take notes for him.  "Sorry, but I got a report of someone finding a dead baby.  I need to go deal with it."

"Not to be callous, Winchester," the Commander said, "but can't one of your lieutenants handle it?"

Dean grimaced.  "The body's been dismembered and dumped.  That's pretty uncommon, and if I don't handle it fast it could turn ugly.  You know what folk get like if they think a little kid's been murdered."

That got him a round of winces, and the Commander nodded briskly, taking the point.  "Fine.  Report back when you're in a position to do so."

 

xXx

 

Dean didn't run back to his sector, because a Watch Captain running through the streets when not in obvious pursuit of someone was a sure way to draw a crowd of interested spectators.  He did slip into the fast, purposeful walk that was as close to a run as he dared, however.  The runner had told him that the body had been found behind Mama Tulip's establishment and that there were two constables standing guard until he arrived.

So it wasn't a great surprise to find a rather green-faced and unhappy Jo hanging out in the street in front of Mama Tulip's, warning off a small group of Mama Tulip's neighbours who were showing signs of curiosity.

"You all right?" Dean asked Jo, concerned.  This would be her first child death, and while no death was pleasant to deal with, children were always worse.

She nodded, swallowing.  "Wasn't expecting the smell," she mumbled unhappily.

Yeah, that never helped.  "Stay put and make sure no one tries to poke around.  Is Mama Tulip about?"

Jo nodded.  "She's gone back inside.  She's not hysterical or anything like that, but she's not happy."

"I'd be worried if she was," Dean said dryly.  "She the one who found it?"

"Yes, but I don't think she took a good look.  She – she smelled it and called us out.  She's pretty angry that someone dumped it here."

Dean nodded.  "I better take a look."

He didn't want to take a look, of course, but he had to know just how bad it was before he decided how to handle it.  Ideally they would be able to bundle up the corpse and remove it before the locals had time to work up a froth about it, but the phrasing the runner had used – _dismembered_ , which had to be quote – was worrying.  If Mama Tulip couldn't tell them how it had got there, and it didn't sound as though she knew, they would have to start asking around for information, and that would not be a good scenario.

Whoever had left the body behind Mama Tulip's had broken into the tiny private courtyard her premises boasted in order to do it.  That in itself was suggestive, given the multitude of other, better dumping spots the perpetrator could have found.

Inside the courtyard Dean found Constable Mїtie on guard.  She looked almost as unhappy as Jo, her dark skin tinged with grey and a pinched look about her mouth, both explained away by the smell Dean caught as soon as he walked into the courtyard.  There was a trough-shaped planter standing next to the building's outer wall and a piece of heavy sacking had been thrown over it.  The stench was coming from that direction.

Holding his breath, Dean pulled the sacking aside – and recoiled.  _"Fuck!"_

If it was a child, in life it must have been horribly deformed.  It was hard to tell because 'dismembered' wasn't a strong enough word – _butchered_ was nearer the mark, and the parts were in a jumble.  Every limb had been removed and hacked apart; Dean wasn't sure but he thought parts of the limbs were missing.  The small torso was in two pieces, neither of which looked complete.  And the head had been removed and – he flinched at the realisation – the scalp and part of the skull had been hacked off.  He wasn't sure but he thought the brain had been removed.  The eyes definitely had.

He dropped the sacking back over the ghastly remains and had to turn away and gulp a few breaths, trying to breath only through his mouth.  Mїtie wordlessly offered him a leather water bottle and he took it gratefully, swilling his mouth out.  Then he accepted the small sprig of fresh mint she held out and chewed it resolutely, grateful for the sharp taste and smell of the herb cleansing his mouth.

"We need a Healer," he told her, when he thought he could speak without throwing up.  "Something about that ain't right – I'm not even sure it's a baby."

Mїtie was staring at him with frightened eyes.  "If it's not a baby, what is it?"

That was the trouble, Dean had no idea what else it could be except a baby.  But he'd seen a lot of kids with birth defects over the years, some of them with minor things like a lazy eye or extra fingers, while others were much more severe with shrunken or missing limbs, or deformed heads.  None of them had looked anything like _this_.  And some of the body parts had long, coarse hair covering them – again, not impossible but wrong somehow.

If it wasn't a human baby, then by default it had to be an animal of some kind.  For that reason alone Dean sent Mїtie off to fetch the beast-healer from Penny Street rather than one of the Healers at the temple in Fountain Square.

When he went back to the gate he saw that Jo had stepped off to one side and was having a polite argument with a woman in the midnight blue uniform of the Palace Guard.  Seeing one of _those_ in this part of the city was almost unheard of, so when Jo glanced back and saw him standing there, Dean gestured them both over.  He was glad he did when he saw who he was dealing with.

She was a captain of the Guard and therefore theoretically Dean's equal, although in practice the Guard tended to trump the Watch in most matters.  The Palace Guard, however, almost never got involved in City law and order matters, so on this occasion at least Dean outranked her squarely.  Looking at her, however, two things at once impressed themselves upon him.

On first impressions at least, she was probably of the same ethnicity as Mama Tulip, and that in turn strongly suggested that she was the 'daughter who worked at the Palace' that some of Tulip's neighbours talked of.  And secondly Dean recognised her from his recent week spent at the Collegium.  They hadn't been introduced as there had been no occasion to do so, but she had been pointed out to him as the Heralds' senior Weaponsmaster ... and one of the most deadly people in Valdemar.

Looking at her now, Dean formed the opinion that her expression did half the work for her.  She had the scariest case of resting-killer-face he'd ever seen.

"Captain May," he acknowledged her when she got close enough, and she registered her surprise at being named with a single blink.  "I'm Captain Winchester.  Are you Mama Tulip's daughter?"

Her mouth tightened slightly – perhaps at the name – but she nodded sharply.  "This is my regular visit," she said, saving Dean from having to ask.  "I just got here, what's going on?"

There was a small but growing crowd of interested watchers, so Dean told Jo to go back to guarding the gate while he invited Captain May just inside it so that they could talk with something approaching privacy.

She caught the smell immediately.  "What's that?"

"Someone dumped a body in your mom's yard," Dean told her, unusually blunt because he could tell she wouldn't thank him for pussy-footing around the subject.  "It might be a little kid – we're not sure, so I've sent for a Healer.  You know anyone who's got a grudge against her?"

"Name me someone who doesn't have a grudge against them," she said coolly, and that was an soldier's cynical response if ever Dean heard one.  "What makes you ask?"

"They could have dumped it anywhere, and there's a few places 'round here where no one would have found it.  They chose to break into your mom's courtyard instead.  Now it might be nothing, but that kind of risk-taking makes me think it's personal.  Any names come to mind?"

To her credit, Captain May gave it some serious consideration before shaking her head.  "Not in the lower city," she said, which was an interesting answer in itself, "but she's upset a few people locally by not doing what they want or expect."

"I heard."  He might as well be upfront about that.  "I had to have a talk with her a couple days ago about the tea she was giving some of her customers.  That kind of thing can go wrong."

"She knows what she's doing," was May's response, defeating his expectations once again, "and it's preferable to what she'd have to do to them otherwise."

"Am I gonna regret asking what you mean by that?"

"I didn't become an instructor in armed and unarmed combat by taking lessons in massage and herbalism from my mother," she said dryly.  "Although those lessons have their uses too."

Dean would have been ready to swear that Mama Tulip was too tiny and frail to be any kind of physical threat, but one look at Captain May's face told him that she didn't know the meaning of the word 'joke' on the subject.  She meant what she was saying, and that added yet another layer of complexity to the case.

Finally, he decided to just ask the question that had been bugging him ever since he'd visited Mama Tulip.  "Why is she even here?  She's in completely the wrong place to make a decent go of a business like hers."

May considered him narrowly before coming to a decision with a brisk little nod to herself.  "Do you know where my mother comes from, Captain?"

Dean shook his head, a little surprised at the question.  "No.  I know I've only ever seen people who look like her – and you – in the upper city, though.  I kinda assumed they're merchants?"

"Many of them are.  They all came here, my mother included, from the far side of the Eastern Empire.  I was born during the journey here.  And for a long time my mother worked at the Palace, but she quarrelled with ... someone powerful ... and she left rather than prejudice my career.  This isn't intended to be a permanent place for her, but until the situation resolves itself ..."  May shrugged.  "It's complicated.  Among my people, there are different degrees of insult.  The kind of insult my mother gave isn't pursued so long as the offender removes themselves from the injured person's notice.  They might hold the grudge; or they might decide to forgive her, in which case she'll be summoned back to their side.  But until that happens, she's better here where she can't compound the offense."

Dean itched to ask who the "someone powerful" was, but her expression was warning him not to pursue that.  All the same ...

"You sure they can't be behind something like this?"

"Positive.  Believe me, it's far too crude for their style, even if they would risk taking revenge against my mother for something so trivial."

"In that case we might be looking at one of her customers."  Dean wondered if Mama Tulip kept a record of her clients.  On balance, he was beginning to think she might.  "I haven't had a chance to talk to her yet, but she's probably upset.  You want to go in and check on her?"

May nodded.  "I will.  And thank you, Captain."

Dean shrugged.  "It's the job."

Her tone turned a little wry.  "So it is.  Can I tell my mother you'll be removing the body?"

"As soon as the Healer's taken a look, sure."

The Healer arrived nearly a quarter-candlemark later, with one of Jim Ellison's sergeants, Megan Connor, in tow.  Dean had been half expecting Sandburg, but Connor was probably better under the circumstances.  Sandburg had a notoriously weak stomach where bodies were concerned, and while this could be amusing, Dean wasn't in the mood today.  The Healer, he had found out since their first encounter, was called Cassie Welles, and allegedly Ellison had a slightly adversarial relationship with her.  That might explain her brusqueness towards other Watch officers.

She made a face as soon as she smelled the corpse.  "Been dead a while then.  What are we dealing with?  Your constable said it might be a child?"

"If it is, there's something really wrong with it," Dean told her.  "I can't be sure, though.  It's – it's been chopped up pretty bad, and there's parts missing."

"Wonderful.  Let's get this over with."

Dean removed the sacking again, and found it wasn't quite as bad as the first time.  Probably the element of surprise made a difference, because Connor sucked in a sharp breath and took a step back, pulling her sleeve over her hand and covering her nose and mouth.  Welles barely reacted, but that was par for the course; aside from being a beast-healer (which was probably a minor part of her job here in the city) she was also one of a small group of Healers who specialised in knowledge of the dead.  She made a brisk examination and quickly covered the remains again.

"You were right, Captain," she told Dean, as she stripped off the thin leather gloves she'd donned for the examination.  "It's not human – I think it's some kind of monkey."

The relief Dean felt at this was almost disproportionate.  "I never saw one before – are you sure?"

"I'll need to lay it out properly back at the temple, but I'm reasonably sure, yes.  It's definitely not a human child, although I can understand why someone might think it was."

"It looked like it had been butchered for meat," Connor said, her voice unsteady.

"Yes, it did.  There are some very obvious parts missing.  Which means ..."  Welles looked at Dean warily.

He grimaced.  "It means I got my own first case in the mystery meat saga."


	2. Chapter 2

Dean met up with Ellison at the Healing Temple a while later, after he'd spent some time talking to Mama Tulip and set Jo and Mїtie checking the nearby area for any other evidence.  Since the streets in that area were on the seedy side, it came as no surprise when they drew a blank.

In the meantime Healer Welles had laid the body out on a stone slab table, arranging the various parts in their proper order.  There were noticeable gaps when Dean reluctantly took his latest look at the remains.

"Not a monkey, but an ape," Welles told the two captains.  "Similar creatures, but monkeys have tails and this one didn't.  Note the parts that are missing.  This poor thing was definitely butchered for its meat, and very specific cuts at that."

"It's missing the brain and eyes," Ellison murmured, peering at it more closely than Dean was willing to get, "it's paws – "

"Hands, actually.  They have hands just like us."

" – most of the internal organs, and the upper legs."

"The tongue's missing too," she added, "and the penis.  They left the lungs and the stomach, but the bile duct has been removed.  Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, and which parts their customers would want.  And one other thing – the hair on it is very thin and sparse, and it sheds when you touch it.  I think the body was treated with something to remove as much hair as possible before it was butchered, because apes and monkeys have quite thick fur all over them.  It's no wonder Captain Winchester's constables thought it was a child when they saw it."

"Maybe that's what someone wanted people to think," Dean said, because it was the first thing that sprang to mind and had to be said.

Ellison looked at him thoughtfully.  "There are always rumours of apothecaries selling the body parts of children for rituals and medicines, but no one has ever produced any reliable evidence."

"It's not an _actual_ child," Dean said with a shrug.  "Just close enough to be sold under the counter, with plausible deniability if the seller gets arrested.  It's not illegal to sell monkey penis, right?"

"It takes someone from the Strangers Quarter to think that's even approaching normal," Welles said sourly.

That stung.  "Hey, I don't like it any better than you do!"

"Besides, who gets to say what's normal?" Ellison said, and he smirked at their expressions.

"You've been working with Sandburg too long," the Healer told him.

"Maybe so.  This still raises a hell of a lot of questions for me.  For a start, this doesn't look _just_ like someone butchering an animal for meat.  I could argue away the brain, eyes and even the penis as being delicacies to someone, but the bile duct says medicine or magic to me.  Winchester?"

"I ain't arguing that.  What's bothering me is who did this.  My people have been all over the butchers in the Strangers Quarter and I'd be ready to swear an oath that none of 'em are involved.  Plus the body parts got dumped this time, and it's looking like it might be a grudge against the person they dumped them on."

"That's one lead to follow up."  Ellison looked at Welles.  "If it's not a butcher – and we've drawn a blank in this sector too – then we're looking for someone else with the skills to take a body apart."

She looked very unhappy at this.  "I know what you're thinking, and I'd love to tell you it's impossible, but ... it's not unheard of for Healers to step off the path.  Especially if they don't have much of the Gift in the first place.  That makes it easier for them to disassociate from the victim."

"An animal makes it easier still," Ellison noted neutrally.  "It's not a victim as such then."

"I know beast-healers who would argue that," she said dryly.  "You want me to write this up and dispose of the remains again?"

"Yes please.  And Cassie – keep an ear to the ground and let us know first if you hear anything that seems related to this case."

Her expression soured, but she assented to this and the two captains left her to it.

"That sounded a little pointed," Dean commented as they left the Temple.

"She goes off half-nocked sometimes," Ellison replied.  "Cassie's good at what she does, but it's not enough for her.  What she'd really like is to be formally attached to the Watch House but we don't have coin in the coffers for that, even if I was interested and I'm not sure I am.  She's a Healer, not a Watch officer, but I think sometimes she forgets that."

"Why doesn't she just enlist then?  No one's gonna turn her down with her skills."

"I think the Healers Circle would have something to say about that.  She's fully Gifted and took the Oath."

The Healer's Oath was legally binding and tied Healers to their Circle for life.  Not all of them took it – some had little or no Gift, which would make it unnecessarily restrictive – but any Healer with the full Gift was obliged to take the Oath and be trained for safety reasons.  Given the nature of the Gift, they didn't usually have a problem with that, but Dean supposed there was always one who might find it chafing.  But a Healer – any Healer – was accountable to the Healers Circle for their actions, and allegedly they could be stripped of their Gift somehow if they were found to have misused it.

Dean abruptly wondered if that could happen to him if he was deemed to have misused his MindSpeech.  He should probably ask Kolsen about it the next time he saw him.

In the meantime, something about the Healer aspect was tickling at the back of his mind.  Rather than force it, Dean told Ellison he was going to head back to his Watch and see if Mama Tulip had come up with the list of her clients that she'd promised him.

"You'll find me on it," Ellison said casually.

Dean stared at him.  "Seriously?"

"Sure.  She's a very skilled masseuse, and she doesn't make things awkward by offering any extra services.  You should try it sometime."

"You didn't drink her tea, did you?"

Ellison looked amused.  "She didn't offer me any."

 

xXx

 

Dean returned to the Ropewalk Watch to find the shifts on the verge of changing and a heightened state of excitement in everyone but old Rufus on the front desk, who was just coming on shift and was particularly grouchy at the unusual level of drama he found in his co-workers.

The source of the excitement was Constable Paoli, normally a steady and reliable member of Dean's shift.  She had a small rush basket on the squad room table and the other constables were peering into it with varying degrees of fascination and amused disgust.

"Captain, come take a look!" she called when Dean appeared.  "Found a trader in the market hiding these under his wagon.  He was selling them for a pretty penny too."

Dean looked with a sense of foreboding and found that the basket was full of eggs – large eggs of a strange ashy green colour, with odd snowflake-like patterns across the shells.

"What kind of eggs did he say they were?" Jo demanded.  She made as if to pick one up, but changed her mind and pulled her hand back at the last minute.

"Phoenix eggs!  Did you ever?"

Dean smothered a sigh and picked one of the eggs up.  "More like dragon eggs," he commented, turning it over in his hand.  It had the weight and solidity of a hard-boiled egg.

They all looked at him suspiciously, but Dean wasn't actually joking.  "They're called dragon eggs, or hundred-year eggs," he said.  "Not illegal, but if this guy was sellin' them under the table we should probably find out where he's getting them from."

"They're legit?" Paoli asked, disappointed.

"'Fraid so.  It's just a way of preserving eggs.  They're made by covering duck or hen's eggs in some kind of ash and salt mixture for three or four months.  It cures the egg, I guess, but it's as weird as all hell when you crack it open."

"Weird as my grandma's tea eggs?" Jo asked him suspiciously.

"Not even in the same recipe book," Dean assured her.  "What's wrong with tea eggs anyway?"  Eggs pickled in spiced tea were a popular snack in the Jkathan and Ruvani communities in the Strangers Quarter, and Dean, true to his heritage, would eat them quite happily at any opportunity.  Which was not often, because the pickling mixture made them a pricey treat for him.

Jo grimaced her horror at this.  "You're a freak of nature," she told him severely.

"And yet I'm still captain around here, so get lost before I write you up for insubordination."

Jo sniffed, but left the squad room.  As she went out, Dean heard Rufus telling someone to go right through and a moment later Captain May tapped on the door.

"Oh heyla, come on in," Dean said.

"What's the celebration?" she asked, indicating the basket of eggs with a slight smile.

"Do your folk eat dragon eggs?" Dean asked.

"They're a delicacy – we usually eat them at important events, like weddings and naming ceremonies.  A basketful like that would set me back as much as two weeks' wages, though."

"Constable Paoli caught a guy in the market selling them from the back of his stall.  I'm wondering where he got them."

May's expression turned wry.  "You might want to follow that up.  If they're not made with the right curing mixture, they can be poisonous."

"Imagine my surprise."  Dean looked at Paoli.  "Hand 'em over to Jody before you go off-shift.  We should question the guy before he has a chance to disappear."

"Will do, Cap'n."

"He was calling them phoenix eggs," Dean commented, as the constable carried the basket of eggs away.

"I've heard them called that before," Captain May said.  "It's not common though.  What will happen to those?"

That was a good question.  "If they turn out to be legit, and the trader hasn't bought them from someone like a fence, then he'll get them back.  If not – "  Dean shrugged.  "He gets written up and fined, and they go in the midden, I guess."

"Pity – what a waste."

Dean grinned at her.  "Sorry, that's just the rules.  If we started handing confiscated goods around, we'd be in trouble pretty quick!"

"I can imagine."  May took a slender roll of smooth paper out of her belt pouch and gave it to him.  "The list of my mother's clients.  Discretion would be appreciated, Captain.  In our culture a massage-giver is considered a kind of healer.  Confidentiality is expected as part of the treatment."

"Understood.  I just want to see if any names jump out at me or suggest a link to what happened today."

"Was it a child?" she asked.

"No – a small ape, according to the Healer, and definitely butchered rather than just cut up."

She looked puzzled.  "Where would they find something like that here in Valdemar?"

"If you have any ideas about that, let me know," Dean said, feeling weary.  "It's one of the mysteries of this case."

When she was gone, Dean took the paper into his office and unrolled it on his desk.  It was smooth, semi-opaque, lightweight, and had a faint yellowish tinge; the list had been written in black ink with a brush in a beautifully precise hand. 

It was surprisingly long.  Many of the names were unfamiliar, but Mama Tulip had been precise and added notes on their professions and locations where she knew of them.  Only a small proportion lived or worked in the Strangers Quarter, which made sense to Dean.  Both Ellison and Sandburg were on the list, along with several senior officers from both the Watch's Command and the City Guard Command.  There were no less than five Heralds.  There was a string of priests, all of whom were male and around middle rank in their temple hierarchies.  There were apothecaries, teachers and non-Bardic affiliated musicians.  The rest were businessmen from the slightly better-off parts of the lower city.  There was a handful of women on the list, but the vast majority of the clients were male.

Mostly what Dean felt after reading the list was surprise, because it completely upended all his ideas of what he thought he knew about Mama Tulip and called into question even those things he knew about her that had supposedly been verified.  He was inclined to trust what Captain May had told him about her mother that day – or, at least, to trust that Captain May herself believed it to be the true story.  But it only served to highlight the fact that a woman of considerable skills had chosen to pursue what looked like an unexpectedly successful niche business in one of the shabbiest parts of Haven, and in such a way that the average observer would inevitably assume she was something she most certainly wasn't.  After all, even if she really was keeping out of sight of an offended courtier, moving into a slum seemed like an extreme way of doing it.

What struck Dean most of all was the number of the clients.  Mama Tulip hadn't specified if they were regular, frequent or more sporadic, but it seemed unlikely to him that all or even the majority of them were frequent.  What little he knew of massage suggested that it was a fairly physical activity.  Catering to this number of people in a short space of time would surely injure even a strong young man, let alone a tiny middle aged woman.

After a while he gave up staring at the sheet of paper in perplexity and decided to do something that would hopefully loosen up his brain muscles a little, while stretching some of his physical muscles at the same time.  Grabbing the arms-locker key from Ash's desk drawer, Dean collected his bows and quiver, and left a message with Rufus about where he could be found for the next candlemark or so if he was needed.  Then he headed off to the Water Street Guard Barracks and training ground.

Ropewalk Watch had a small training yard behind the Watch House, complete with targets, and these were adequate enough when all Dean wanted to do was give his bows an airing.  He tried to take them out every day or so, just to string and draw them, because otherwise he would never have been able to do so.  The longbow was not a weapon that could casually be picked up and set aside at will.  But if he wanted to actually practice, using proper targets, he had to go to the Guards' training ground and use their archery butts.

It could justifiably be said that this was Dean's only real hobby, and he wasn't able to indulge it nearly as much as he would like.  It was a good way to set his head in order when he needed to, though.

The armsmasters at the barracks knew Dean well, and let him through to the training grounds and archery butts with little more than some genuinely friendly jokes.  There was no one else there at that time of day, and from his own brief experience as a Guard cadet Dean guessed that he had timed it just right, when the majority of the cadets would be on their so-called 'rest and relaxation' hour, which was actually the only part of the day when they got time to clean and perform necessary maintenance of their equipment and uniform.

Three of the archery butts were set up already, so Dean stripped off his jerkin and shirt to allow easier movement, put on his arm guards, and took out the first of his bows to string it.  This was a monster of a bow, made from a single length of yew, and had been his father Jon's weapon.  It was only an inch or so shorter than Dean himself.  He warmed it in his hands for a space, before looping the string over one end, bracing it against the arch of his foot, and drawing down the head of the bow to hook the other end of the string into place.

Dean's bows had names.  He'd been criticised by the Guard's armsmasters more than once for this, because the rule in the army was that a named weapon made its wielder become dangerously attached to what was, in the end, just a useful tool.  But in the Jkathan woodsman culture that Dean came from, weapons were always named.  This was partly because of a superstitious belief that naming a weapon gave it a soul and engendered a willingness in it to serve its owner, but it was also for the simple practical reason that naming a tool tended to make its owner more scrupulous about caring for it.

The big yew bow was called _Sukiyat_ – a Jkathan word meaning "bone-eye".  In the folklore of Dean's people, a man or woman who didn't flinch was said to have an eye made of bone.

Dean settled his quiver over his shoulder, took Bone-Eye and stepped up to the first circular spot in the turf that marked the archer's position.  He took a few steadying breaths before setting an arrow to the string, and took his time drawing it, whispering the traditional invocation to Keirnys, hunter god of the deep woods, to the both the arrow and his bow.  Then he released it.

His first shot was well wide of the bullseye, which came as no surprise for it had been a while since Dean had had an opportunity to practice.  The stretch in his arms, shoulders and lower back told him that he would probably suffer for it in the morning as well.  But he drew another arrow and set it to the string.  By the time he'd emptied his quiver the last couple of shots had landed in the black.

He retrieved the arrows, and set Bone-Eye carefully aside.  His second bow was a mulberry flatbow, shorter than Bone-Eye by nearly five inches.  Its name was _Tchak-Tchak_ or "magpie", a bird that in Jkathan folklore was one of the goddess Bel's totems and the giver or taker-away of good fortune.  This bow was Dean's own, made for him by his grandmother only weeks before Jon had taken his sons and left the village at Dell's Crossing.  It had been bigger than Dean at first, intentionally so, for Deanna had meant for him to grow into it.  He took his time warming Magpie before he strung it, then set himself up before the target again.

Archery was probably as close to meditation as Dean would ever get, quietening his mind and sharpening his focus until there was nothing but him, the bow and his target.  Such was his concentration that by the time he'd shot his final quiver, retrieved the arrows and unstrung both bows, he was clear-headed and the idea that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since he'd left the Healing Temple that afternoon was starting to develop properly.

Dean returned his bows to the Watch House, and took a detour on the way home by way of the Beadweaver Street Baths, where he bought himself a long soak in stinging hot water to soothe muscles that would otherwise start to scream at him as soon as he relaxed in his bed that night. He made a point of eating a decent meal in Ellen's tavern when he returned to the Roadhouse Inn, drank a moderate mug of ale, then retired to his rooms, where he pulled out Mama Tulip's list and went through it carefully once more.

He was still thinking about it as he doused his candle and drifted off to sleep.

 

xXx

 

"Sometimes I worry about you," Ellen commented the following morning.  "Either I'm tipping a bucket of cold water over you to wake you up, or you're scaring Tamar by lurking in the taproom when she opens the shutters in the morning."

"Reckon I'd remember if you threw water at me," Dean retorted, but it was half-hearted.

Ellen frowned.  "What's eating you now?"

He wrinkled his nose.  "How long you got?"

"Knew there was a reason I skipped before they could pin a set of lieutenant's bars on me.  That, and I had a tavern the fight to the death for."  Ellen swung the kettle over the fire and sat down on the kitchen stool next to him.  For all that spring was well and sprung, it was still chilly in the mornings, and she pulled her shawl a little tighter about her shoulders.  "How are the arrangements for Festival going?"

Dean shuddered.  "Don't get me started."

"The usual, then.  And the unicorn thing?"

"Probably gonna get its own place in Watch history at this rate.  Along with the dancing goat."

"Wonderful.  That everything?"

"Not nearly."

"Uh huh."  But neither of them put a name on the most obvious 'other thing' that was bugging Dean.  Ellen liked to project the impression that she was a sturdy unsentimentalist, but in point of fact she was just as sappy as the next tough female tavern-owner.  She saw most people's personal dramas if they came to the Roadhouse often enough, and with that added to her extensive awareness of the human condition as imparted by a previous career in the Watch, she could read people almost as well as any Collegium MindHealer.  She was far from unsympathetic, but she knew when to keep her mouth shut, so she promptly changed the subject before Dean could take fright and disappear.  "I've heard pretty much _nothing_ on this meat business.  Don't you have any leads?"

"Oh, I gotta great one," Dean said rather grimly.  "But I can't see anything I can do about it."

"You think you know who it is?"

"Hm.  Let's say I'd like to rule them out conclusively.  But if I go up to their front door and ask, of course they're gonna say it's not them, and I'm never gonna know for sure.  And I know – I _know_ – it's gonna bring me a barrel-load of grief if I do."

Ellen considered this.  "Someone powerful?"

"Everything I know about them says they're in with powerful people.  It's not obvious, but it smells of it, you know?"

"Yeah, I know.  You told Ellison?"

"Yeah, no.  Even if he buys it, and there's no guarantees, he'll want to go in the front door and ask.  If they are pulling this off, that's it – they'll shut it down and move it the minute any of us show our faces."

She nodded.  "So you're thinking of going in over the back wall."

"Something like that."

"Who were you planning to take with you as lookout?"

"I wasn't.  I'm not getting any of my people involved in this.  I _might_ be able to talk myself out of trouble with the new Commander at a pinch, but you know she'd have to sack anyone lower than me on principle.  I'm not risking any of my Watch."

Ellen snorted, but nodded her agreement.  "You're still only just off the shit-list yourself, though.  Be better if you had a genuine reason for going in the front."

He shrugged.  "Them's the breaks."

She sighed.  "Between the two of us, just who are we talking about here, Dean?"

He told her.

"Well damn."  Ellen considered it for a while, and made a sour face.  "You know what, I think you could be right.  It'd be like him, wouldn't it?"

"He has such a great sense of humour," Dean said sarcastically, and she huffed a laugh.  "Explains a lot too, I'm thinking.  Like dumping the last body on Mama Tulip, who I'm starting to think isn't _just_ a high-class masseuse."

She sniffed sceptically at this, but let it go.  "His yard's on the far side of Penny Street's sector, and you're too recognisable.  If you're seen out and about without one of their Watch, you'll be made."

"I wasn't planning to go in broad daylight," Dean objected.

"Still too risky.  Only takes one person to see you and say something in the wrong company."  Ellen got up mechanically, thinking it over as she took the boiling kettle off the fire and made coffee.  "I might have an opportunity to go in there legitimately in a few days' time.  Leave it with me."

"No," Dean said flatly.  "You're not Watch anymore."

"And I won't be going in as Watch.  I've got a legitimate reason."

"Seriously?  Ellen, I don't even know what we're gonna charge him with if we catch him!  Fake unicorn steaks ain't the crime of the century!"

"Then you and Ellison better find something to pin on him, hadn't you?" she retorted.

 

xXx

 

It was a good point, but not one Dean was ready to put to Ellison yet.  Nor was he quite ready to share the conclusions he'd drawn with anyone other than Ellen.  There were too many other questions left hanging: Where were the animals coming from?  Why were they being butchered when they were probably quite valuable?  Who else was in on it?  Why exactly had Mama Tulip been specifically targeted?

Dean was left feeling restless and uneasy, and not just because of the meat saga and Ellen's determination to insert herself into the investigation.  Spring Festival was approaching – a prime opportunity to discreetly offload some dodgy meat into the bellies of the local populace if Dean had ever seen one – and he was embroiled in a lot of exasperating meetings with local dignitaries about things like managing the routes of the processions to the Temple of the Maiden, the number of floats and carts each street or particular religious group could have, the number of constables and guards on duty to ensure everything from crime sprees to riots to religious vendettas didn't break out.  That, and a thousand other details, had to be agreed in order to ensure that the city-wide semi-religious carnival went off as smoothly as possible.

Dean felt more than ordinarily impatient with the whole business, not just with the Festival but with _everything_.  Something itched at him under his skin, almost making him want to throw in the towel and leave the city by the fastest method available.  And he didn't know why.  It wasn't a MindSpeaking thing – at least, he didn't think it was, but how the hell would he know for sure?  All he could tell, when he cautiously lowered his shields, was that it didn't _seem_ like anyone was messing with him.  All he got was the usual jumble of background noise and a feisty headache for his pains.

All the same, he thought he had his testiness under a lock until one of Jody's constables, Godyr, arrived for his shift one day both very late and very drunk for the second time in a month.  Thanks to his family history, Dean had more patience with this kind of thing than many Watch Captains, but he was well aware that going gently on Godyr this time would do no one any favours.  The Ropewalk Watch was a small enough crew that one person acting out caused disproportionate problems for the others and, consequently, caused equally disproportionate resentment if it wasn't dealt with swiftly.

Dean was aware that his tone was unusually sharp as he gave Godyr his dressing-down, ordered him to go home and sober up, and advised him that his pay would be docked for the missed duty.  But when Godyr was dismissed Jody stayed behind, eyeing Dean cautiously.

"You all right?" she asked him.

"No," he grumbled.  "I never like having to do this stuff.  Our people are grown-ups, dammit, I'm not their mother and I shouldn't have to tell them not to be morons."

"Goes with the job," Jody said philosophically, but she was still eyeing him.  "Sure that's all it is?"

Dean eyed her back.  "Why?"

She shrugged.  "Just seems like something's bugging you lately."

Dean wasn't the sort of man to get confessional with his subordinates, but the question seemed genuine enough.  "Seems like since I came back from the Palace, everything's kind of ... out of focus," he admitted.  "I half feel like I ought to be somewhere else."

Her dark eyebrows quirked a little.  "Sure you didn't accidentally pick up a big white friend while you were there?" she teased.  "Maybe it's sneaking around behind you when you're not looking."

He gave her a look.  "Do I look like Herald material to you?"

"Does anyone?"

"Trust me, I'm not their type."

"Too snarky," she said, nodding solemnly.  "And you swear too much."

Dean grinned reluctantly.  "Seriously, though, you ever feel like you should just pack up your stuff and walk?  No special reason, just ..."  He flapped a hand vaguely.

"All the time," Jody quipped, but she reached out unexpectedly and squeezed his arm.  "It's just spring.  It always feels like there ought to be more to life in spring.  And we'll all feel better when Festival's over with."

Aware that Jody had personal reasons for disliking Spring Festival, Dean nodded and let it go.

He didn't think it was just spring, though.

Dean still had a phoenix egg seller to track down and put the frighteners on, so he took himself out into the streets and headed for the market stalls of Pannier Walk, which was where Herald Kolsen found him in his usual unobtrusive and slightly creepy way.  Today he was dressed as a scribe again, in his well-worn rusty black robe and a woollen skullcap with ear-flaps and long ties and, together with the wax tablets and wooden pen case he carried under one arm, the image was complete.  Dean sighed inwardly, but not to play along with this not only seemed like a dick move but was also probably dangerous in some way.

Still ...

_I'm starting to think you can't help yourself_ , he commented, studiously ignoring the 'scribe'.

_"Helping myself" around here would surely get me arrested?_ was the immediate response, effervescent with amusement.

_I think you're safe, I got bigger fish to fry.  Don't buy any phoenix eggs though.  I'm pretty sure the guy selling 'em won't be able to confirm what they were cured in._

_Well, I'm glad you told me that mind-to-mind,_ Kolsen replied mildly, _otherwise I would have thought you were being unusually cryptic.  That sounds like a remarkably unpleasant snack, by the way._

_They ain't my party food of choice, but some folk'll sell their family spoons for 'em.  Were you looking for me?_

_As it happens, I was.  I have some information about your mystery animal meat that you might find interesting._

Dean perked up.  _Is this where one of us says "Meet me by the fountain under the cover of darkness"?_

_Actually, I was going to suggest that I meet you by the tea-seller's stall in the next street in a few minutes._

_Oh well, if you_ want _to be boring about it ..._

Was it weird how well he got along with Kolsen?  The man was the _Lord Marshal's Herald_ , one of the most powerful Heralds in the Circle and therefore one of the most powerful people in the kingdom.  Under normal circumstances he shouldn't even know Dean's name.  Dean wasn't even sure why Kolsen kept visiting him, other than the MindSpeaking thing – and if that had been the only reason, then surely it should have been someone like Herald Raylor or Herald Ansel.

Well ... except for the fact that Raylor was the heir to the throne and Ansel was the Queen's Own Herald.  Looked at in that light, it made more sense for it to be Kolsen who checked up on him, but Dean still thought, uneasily, that there must be someone else they could delegate the task to.  Someone less important to the rest of the realm, for Dean himself certainly wasn't important enough to waste all this effort and time upon.

Maybe Kolsen just really liked dressing up as a scribe and puttering around the lower city markets and taverns.  Dean could see how it would make a change from his usual routines, but he was sceptical of that change being an amusing one.

Kolsen was waiting by the tea stand when Dean strolled over, already clutching a cheap pottery cup in one hand.  He was even wearing the thin fingerless mittens that some scribes wore, Dean noticed resignedly, and there was an ink-stain on the second finger of his hand.  Of course there was.

He bought himself a cup of gillyflower tea, and raised his eyebrows at the other man.  Kolsen smiled faintly and inclined his head towards a small rustic bench a few feet away that had just been vacated.

"How's Lola?" Dean asked casually as they sat down.

"Very well, I thank you, and she sends her fond regards."

"Yeah?"  Dean fought with the ridiculous pleasure this gave him; it was only a common pleasantry after all.  But if there had been one great bright spot in his enforced stay at the Collegium, it had been the Companions.  And he was not – _not_ – the kind of fool to go soft over Companions.  They had just been very civilised to him.  He appreciated that sort of thing.

"You make an impression, Dean."

"I know a whole bunch of petty criminals who'd agree with that."

Kolsen chuckled.  "So.  Do you know what a circus is?"

Dean blinked.  "Er ... no?"

Kolsen nodded, his eyes wandering casually over the throng of people in the narrow street.  "It's not something we experience here in Valdemar – we're not really a prime destination for that kind of thing.  Too far north, too sparsely populated, too difficult to get to.  I'm sure you know about travelling mummers and entertainers, though."

"Sure, there's a couple of troupes pass through Haven regular as clockwork.  We're expecting one of them for Spring Festival."

"Well, a circus is a little like a group of travelling entertainers, only bigger, more organised and more ... exotic, for want of a better word.  They have more extravagant acts, including things like dangerous wild beasts."

Dean leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.  "But they don't come to Valdemar."

"No.  But they have been known to come fairly close – the border towns of Hardorn and Rethwellan."  Kolsen took a sip of his tea.  "When I was first in Whites I undertook a number of clandestine outkingdom missions.  One of them involved travelling for a short while with a circus."

Dean considered this.  "That where you saw the big-ass snakes you talked about before?"

Kolsen inclined his head.  "Among other things.  Anyway, I have a ... contact ... who used to have links with the circus I travelled with.  He knows quite a lot about the business, not just circuses in general, but also travelling faires and other groups who might reasonably be assumed to have, at the very least, access to unusual animals from distant places.  He still has information sources in the business.  And recently it came to his ears that one such group encountered difficulties in the disputed land between Karse and Rethwellan that abuts the Holderkin lands on _our_ border.  What happened precisely is unclear – "

"Bad weather and brigands?" Dean suggested, with a smirk.

"Brigands of a sort, I have no doubt," Kolsen replied dryly.  "The group split up and fled into Rethwellan as best they could, abandoning anything that could slow them down.  Rumour suggests the brigands in question were then left in Menmellith, where officially they had no business being, with riches that were more than an ordinary source of embarrassment. It's suggested that some desperate measures were embraced."

"Let me guess; they involved some opportunists on our side of the border who didn't know quite what they were getting into either."

"There are always opportunists on that stretch of border," Kolsen said, and there was a bitter undertone to this.  "It's a tenuous link, though, Dean – more rumour than substance."

"Maybe, but your buddy must think it's a fair bet or he wouldn't have made the connection in the first place, right?"

"True."

"I'm gonna run with some wild guesses here," Dean said.  "That travelling faire had a bunch of exotic animals in their train – snakes, zeebru, monkeys and the like.  Maybe for showing off, maybe for sale.  They took a risk crossing into Menmellith and ran into one of those Karsite militias dressed up like bandits and trying to stir up trouble.  They decided they liked their asses whole and untouched by the holy fire of Vkanda, and they lit out of there, leaving all the animals behind for the militia to find.  The militia figure they don't fancy being sent to the fires either just because all they caught was a bunch of weird animals, and they look for a way to offload them onto some other idiot.  And that idiot happens to be a Valdemaran who has no fucking idea what he's taking on."

"Something like that," Kolsen agreed.  "I suspect more than one idiot was involved."

Dean looked at him.  "Tell me you aren't enjoying the idea of these morons having to wrangle a bunch of weird-ass animals past the Holderkin settlements.  Because that had to be something to see."

"Considering the Holderkin's sense of humour, or lack thereof, it must have taken considerable ingenuity," Kolsen said.  "The risk was probably balanced against the usual disinclination they have for involving what they consider to be outsiders in their business though.  It would have taken more than someone escorting a clutch of odd-looking ponies along the South Trade Road for the Holderkin to consider speaking to the nearest authorities."

"We have any idea who decided to bring the animals into Valdemar?"

"None, I'm afraid – no actual evidence that it even happened.  This is all speculation.  Are you any further forward at this end?"

"I've a hunch," Dean said, and he made a face.  "It's just a hunch though."

"Keep digging," Kolsen advised him.  "I have faith in your ability to work this out.  And if you discover a solid lead that has an actual person attached to it, I might be willing to involve myself.  Stopping smuggling on that border completely is a pipe-dream, but disrupting the chain, even temporarily, would be worthwhile."  He drained the last of his tea.  "Ah well, I'd better be about my business.  Good day to you, Captain."

"Yeah, I'll be seeing you, I guess," Dean replied wryly.  He waited until Kolsen was well lost in the crowd, then drained his own mug, returned it to the vendor, and headed off in an oblique direction.  It was time to put all the new information, and his hunches, before Ellison.

 

xXx

 

Jim Ellison considered the matter for an unnervingly long time.  "You really think it could be Crowley?"

"We're looking for someone who knows enough to take a body apart and surgically remove something like the bile duct," Dean said.  "Hell, we need someone who even knows what the bile duct is and where to find it.  That means someone who had some kind of legit healer training, and you know he has that."

Ellison looked across his office to where Sandburg was leaning against the clerk's desk.  Sandburg shrugged in response to the unspoken question. 

"He was the emergency sawbones in your unit for a couple of years, Jim."

"Which is just one of the reasons I'm reluctant to accuse him of anything without good, hard evidence," Ellison replied.  He tapped a finger on his desk restlessly for a moment, then looked at Dean again.  "You've got to have more than this."

"Call it a gut feeling," Dean replied.  Which it was, but ...  "Cards on the table time," he admitted.  "I've never been comfortable with the guy.  He knows too much about stuff he has no business knowing, and he's cosy with people I just plain don't trust."

"He knew about Jon."

"He knew stuff about my family," Dean corrected him, feeling his mouth tighten with discomfort.  "I don't say he was the one to start the rumours about Dad, but I'm pretty sure he was the one who made them sound convincing after other people laid the groundwork."  He sighed.  "He's too pally with that troll Pyote."  Pyote was a Guardsman from the Water Street Guard, a perennial thorn in Dean's foot, and almost certainly an informant of some kind for someone very much higher up the food chain in Haven.

"And for that reason alone we have to be careful how we handle this," Ellison warned.  "I'm not sure who's holding Pyote's leash, but I know enough about the spy business in this city to know it could be someone ... surprising.  Just because Pyote's a nasty son of bitch doesn't mean he can't be _legitimately_ useful to people.  Same could be said for certain others."

"Well, if Crowley's useful to someone, it's nobody legit," Dean said flatly. 

"What makes you so sure?"

Dean hesitated for a moment, because while he trusted Ellison and Sandburg, he didn't know the rest of their crew so well.  After a moment of purely inner twitching, he lowered his shields and did a quick 'check' of the near vicinity.  No one was within earshot at that moment.

"Because my source is the Lord Marshal's Herald," he said, keeping his voice down.

"Whoa," Sandburg said, startled, but Ellison just stared at him for a moment or two.

"Huh," he said finally.

"Yeah."

"That explains a few things."  Ellison gave Dean a sharp look.  "You realise he's probably Valdemar's spymaster-general?"

Actually, that hadn't occurred to Dean so far, but it made perfect sense.  "So it's probably _him_ holding Pyote's chain," he commented.  It wasn't an appetising thought.

"I doubt Pyote knows that," Sandburg said.  "Gotta be a few go-betweens there."

"Maybe," Dean said, but Kolsen's scribe disguise was beginning to make sense to him too.  He didn't claim to know Kolsen well, but it was hard to imagine him being entirely hands-off in his approach.  He might not handle someone like Pyote directly, but it would be like him to be nearby while someone else did.

Distantly, the sound of voices drifted in from Penny Street's front desk.  Frowning, Sandburg excused himself and went to find out what was going on.

Dean hesitated, but he preferred what he wanted to say next to be heard only by Ellison.  "Someone else who knows too much about my family – and who's pally with Crowley – is Bela Talbot," he said softly.

"That I already knew," Ellison replied.  "You know I'm not defending Crowley?  I know him too well.  He never caused any trouble when he was under my command, but I never kidded myself – he only kept the line because I always made sure he knew I was watching him."

"Guess he thinks you're not watching him now," Dean suggested mildly.  Ellison frowned, but didn't dispute the point.

"Talbot," he said instead.  "I saw her leaning on you at HQ.  She tweaking your tail?"

Dean shrugged, a little annoyed at how easily Ellison read him.  "When doesn't she?"

"You think she's in on this somehow?"

Dean considered.  "I got no reason to think so.  Wouldn't surprise me if she knows something about it though."

"Me either.  I know it goes without saying, but walk very carefully around her.  I wouldn't be surprised if – "

He was cut short by Sandburg returning to the office, with someone unexpected in tow – Ellen Harvelle.  She was dressed in what Dean immediately recognised as her 'everyday best', the dress and shawl she wore when she had to transact official business somewhere, such as the Proctor's office.

She greeted Ellison civilly, then said "Thought I might find you here" to Dean.

"And what can Penny Street Watch do for you today, Madam Harvelle?" Ellison asked, rather dryly.

"Everyone talks fancy to me now I'm not Watch," she said irritably. 

"Well, rumour has it you're a respectable businesswoman these days," he replied, and Dean had to duck his head to hide the grin that wanted to break out.  Ellison said this stuff completely seriously, or so it seemed, but he had a sneaky sense of humour that not everyone noticed.

Ellen side-eyed him suspiciously, but accepted the chair Sandburg pulled forward for her.  "I went to Crowley's workshop with Maggie Scully this morning," she said.  "Giving her moral support, which Sert knows she needed to deal with Crowley."

"Damn it, Ellen ..." Dean said, exasperated. 

"I would've gone with her anyway," she snapped back.  "The captain was one of Bill's cronies."

"Captain Scully died over a month ago, didn't he?" Sandburg said, surprised.

"The family's from Lake Evendim," Ellison said.

"So?"

"So they expose their dead to scavengers for a lunar month before cremating the remains," Dean said.  "There's a couple of groups in my sector do that.  There's a tower outside the city boundaries they use, it's near the crematoria, but Crowley's the only undertaker in the city licensed to handle those kind of arrangements."

Sandburg looked a little green at this.  "Wow.  Right.  The more you know, I guess."

"Maggie needed to arrange for the captain's remains to be collected and cremated," Ellen said, "and Crowley likes his little jokes with widows when they don't have someone to back them up, so I went with her.  She did the same for me when Bill died."

"I would have thought one of her sons would have been there," Ellison said, and the look on his face said that the Scully heirs had just lost something in his estimation.  "The eldest isn't posted _that_ far away.  And doesn't she have a son-in-law who's a Herald?"

"She said he's still out on circuit," Ellen said, shrugging, "and he's a little, well, _odd_ anyway.  Her daughter would've come too, I'm sure, but you know how it is with Healers."

"Convenient," Dean drawled.

"Don't knock it," she retorted.  "It was a way through the door without Crowley looking at me funny.  You needed eyes on the inside."

Dean sighed and tried not to take the look Ellison gave him personally.  "You're not gonna tell me he let you poke around the workshop while he talked business with Madam Scully."

"No, but it was worth it just to get a feel for the place.  Workshop's busy, I gotta say."

"Death's a growth business," Ellison said.  "What's new about that?"

"How many people does he usually have working for him?" Ellen asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

Ellison turned to look at Sandburg, but he was already rooting around the ledgers behind the clerk's desk.  He pulled one down and flipped it open, leafing through the pages rapidly.  "Should be five – two embalmers, two carpenters, and a driver."

"I know for a fact Crowley's got a good half-dozen women on tap as mourners and layers-out," Dean objected.

"Yeah, but they're as-and-when labour," Sandburg said.  "Most of 'em do other work when they're not, you know, wailing and rending.  Or shrouding."

"Laying-out's a good sideline for laundresses," Ellen commented.  "Folk prefer them to do it because they're strong and clean.  My girl Podina does laying-out occasionally."

Sandburg exchanged looks with Dean for a moment.  "Guess I'm learning a lot about death today," he muttered, putting the ledger back on the shelf.

"Well, he's got more'n five people in there now if I'm any judge, and they ain't all embalming or knocking together coffins."  Ellen paused, and added reluctantly, "And there's a smell around the place.  Maggie noticed it too."

"It's a mortuary," Ellison said.

"It smells like old blood and straw," Ellen said irritably.  "Never smelled like that before.  Usually all you can smell is the herbs and incense he uses to cover any stink from the dead."

Ellison pinched the bridge of his nose wearily.

"So we've got a bad smell and extra activity," Sandburg summed up.

"Not enough to justify even going in there to question him," Dean said.

Ellison agreed.  "And if we tried it, we'd just tip him off.  Ideally we want to catch him or his people in the act."

"In the act of _what?_ " Ellen demanded.  "Since when does Crowley hold a butcher's licence?"

"I'd have to check with the Procter's office, but he probably does," Ellison said, and he smirked when Ellen bridled indignantly.  "He's that kind of guy.  I know for a fact he still holds an emergency surgeon's licence from the Healers' Circle."

"It's not the actual butchering that's the problem," Dean said, when she turned her outraged eyes on him.  "It's the handling of the live animals and disposal of the carcasses."

"Oh, well that's all right then!" she said, exasperated.

"It's not, but doing something about it's gonna take a trick or two."

"Festival's practically around the corner," Sandburg said.  "That'd be a good time to shift some meat, with all the street sellers that'll be out.  And maybe a good time to dispose of more carcasses, while everyone's looking elsewhere."

Dean allowed himself a small, purely internal sigh.  "I'll rearrange cover so I can be on hand and – "

"And you won't, because we've got this," Ellison interrupted him.  "Your brothers are coming home for Festival, aren't they?  Spend some time with them.  I'll call on Jody if I need to."

"Jim – "

"You've had enough problems recently," Ellison said firmly.  "Spend some time with your family.  Jody's solid and so are the rest of your crew.  It's not like you're leaving the city, we can find you if we have to."

"Besides," Sandburg put in wryly, "the way this case has been running so far, forget about the unicorn steaks - we'll be lucky if we find a single mouldy sausage for sale."

"And if mouldy sausages are the only problem we have this Festival, I'll retire happy," Ellison concluded.

Considering the kind of mischief the denizens of the lower city could get up to even on an ordinary day, Dean was inclined to agree with him.

 

xXx

 

All the same, it was easy for Jim Ellison to say "go home and enjoy the Festival", but quite another thing for Dean to do that.  For one thing, there was a multitude of tasks any Watch Captain had to undertake or oversee before a public holiday such as Spring Festival, and added to those was the inevitable rise in public 'incidents' that went hand in hand with any increase in excitement in the populace.  In order to enjoy a couple of days of freedom, Dean first had to pay the usual penalty of having to put in many extra hours of work.

He was busy enough that perhaps it was unsurprising that Castiel's return to Haven took him by surprise.

 

xXx

 

Dean was awoken the morning after Festival by a persistent nudging of his shoulder.  He dragged his face out of his pillow and squinted at Castiel.

"Whuh?" he demanded petulantly.

Castiel didn't look any happier at being awake than Dean did.  "Eslan says there's a Watch officer looking for you."

"Ugh."  Dean planted his face back into the pillow for several precious moments, but there was nothing to be done; he reluctantly pushed a foot out from under the blankets and groped around gingerly until his toes hit the floor.  From there it was a matter of getting the rest of himself out of bed backwards and by increments.  When most of himself was out, he peeled his eyes open again and cautiously pushed himself upright.

His head lurched a little but the room straightened up almost at once.  Great.  Of course, most of the blankets were now on the floor and Castiel was looking decidedly pissy about that, but a cold bath, some clothes and a mug of strong Watch House tea, and Dean would be ready to face the world.  It was just a shame that he was only likely to get one of those things, and before he could get _that_ he needed to sort out the tangle of clothing scattered around the room.

"I'm reconsidering you as a lifemate," Castiel grumbled, rolling clumsily off the bed and landing on the floor with a thump.

"Good morning to you too, stud," Dean retorted.  "Where are my underpants?"

"I'll underpants your _face._ "

"Got it; not a morning-after person."

Somehow between the two of them they managed to find their respective garments, although Dean was peeved to discover that putting on his fancy festival braces took considerably more manual dexterity after a night of carousing than they had the previous morning, and bending to tie his shoelaces made his head swim unpleasantly.

The full impact of their awakening didn't hit until they stepped out of the quiet inn and into the harsh chill of a very early spring morning.

"Oh Great Mother Goddesses, _why?_ " Castiel moaned.

"You didn't have to get up too," Dean said belatedly, and he weathered the glare he got for it manfully.

"Morning, Dean."  Blair Sandburg was disgustingly awake and cheerful for someone who had been on duty all night during a major festival.  "Nice outfit!"

"Sandburg, I genuinely hate you right now."

"I'll try not to take it personally.  Guess you had a good night, huh?"

"I'm still officially having it, so why am I awake and talking to you at the asscrack of dawn on my day off?"

"Jim's compliments, and he thought you might want to take a look at the latest carcass before we get rid of it."

Dean made a grumpy suggestion about a sexual act he'd like to see the carcass-dumper perform on themselves.  Sandburg grinned, but Castiel frowned in confusion.

"That doesn't sound safe or comfortable," he pointed out.

"Better and better."  Dean saw Sandburg's curious glance at Castiel.  "Oh - right.  Blair Sandburg; Herald-Trainee Castiel.  Sandburg's the First Lieutenant at the Penny Street Watch, Cas."

"Is it normal for you to show people dead animals at dawn?" Castiel asked him.

"Only recently," Sandburg said, nonplussed.

"Oh."

"Please tell me we're gonna pass a real, live tea-seller with actual hot tea to sell," Dean grumbled as they set off.

"Kettle's on at the Watch House," Sandburg offered.

"Oh good, stewed gillyflower.  I can't wait."

"So if you're a Herald-Trainee, where's your Companion?" Sandburg asked Castiel.

"Unlike the rest of us, he's allowed to sleep in today."

"Message received, loud and clear," Sandburg said wryly.

"What kind of body parts have we got this time?" Dean asked him.

"No idea.  I was out on patrol, they sent a runner after me and asked me to find you.  The kid didn't know any more than that."

"Huh."

"Do you have some manner of killer on the loose?" Castiel asked.

"Not exactly," Dean replied.  "Oh hey, I never told you about this stuff, did I?  We got some idiot selling the meat from weird animals."  He and Sandburg gave Castiel a quick and dirty run-down of the mystery as they walked through the streets.

Castiel was intrigued.  "So these are all creatures native to warmer countries?  Where are they coming from?"

"That part's all guesswork at the moment – could be someone's menagerie, could be someone offloading a bunch of animals they picked up by accident," Sandburg said.

"Some accident," Dean grumbled.

"So you're from Jkatha?" Sandburg said to Castiel, his eyes bright with interest.  Unlike most Valdemarans, he pronounced the kingdom's name correctly.  "Bet you had a hell of a journey getting here.  Me and my mom, we passed through Jkatha when I was a kid and the border with Ruvan was a nightmare.  Finishing up, we turned back and took our chances in the Pelagirs until we could cross into Rethwellan."

"I wouldn't recommend passing through Ruvan to get to Rethwellan anyway," Castiel replied, eyeing him curiously. "The borders between Rethwellan, Ruvan and Karse are notoriously unstable."

"Oh, we weren't heading for Rethwellan originally.  We were supposed to meet some friends of Mom's in Thurbrigard, but she changed her mind."

"If that is a reference to the Vateryan Uprising," Castiel said dryly, "then turning back was probably a good idea."

"Yeah, I guess."

"What's the Vateryan Uprising?" Dean asked, interested, and the rest of their walk to the Healing Temple was occupied with Castiel's truncated account of the small group of mountain tribes who had seized control of a vital trade road into Thurbrigard's capital and somehow managed to provoke ten years of genocidal civil war in the country as a result.

"Those mountain kingdoms are historically prone to that sort of thing," Castiel concluded.

The Healing Temple was right on the edge of the Exiles Gate sector, so Dean wasn't especially surprised to see Bobby Singer's First Lieutenant, Tamara, in attendance.  She didn't look terribly happy about it, but neither did anyone else present.  There was something lying on the examination slab, covered by an old blanket, that smelled of about a dozen kinds of putrescence.

Dean baulked for a second, gritting his teeth.  "I'm not sure I'm sober enough for this."

The Healer present was a short redhead with sharp blue eyes and a cool expression.  She reached into a jar on the counter behind her and pulled something out that she tossed to him.  Dean caught it on reflex; it was a small bundle of strong aromatic herbs in muslin.

"Hold that to your nose and breathe through your mouth," she instructed him curtly, and she tossed a couple more to Sandburg and Castiel.

"Healer Dana Scully, this is Captain Dean Winchester of the Ropewalk Watch," Ellison said.  "Or at least, that's who he usually is, when he's not wearing ... that."  He waved a hand at Dean's costume, and raised a satirical eyebrow at him.

"Sass," Dean grumbled, but the comeback was weak.  He took a couple of gulps of the herb scent.  "What have we got?"

Tamara made an unhappy sound.

"Stray dogs unearthed this from a midden a few streets from here," Ellison said.  "Technically it's within Penny Street's jurisdiction, but Tamara's crew were nearest."

"Yeah, but what is it?" Sandburg asked.  His voice sounded constricted and he was already looking a little green.  Not that Dean blamed him for that.

The Healer pulled back the blanket, and Dean swore.  "That's a person," he ground out, when he could do so without retching.

"Yes, it is," the Healer said flatly.  "I haven't had a chance to do a full examination yet, because Captain Ellison wanted you here first, but the body is male, I'd estimate his age to be in the early fifties, and he's been cut open from sternum to pubis."

"And he's a dwarf," Dean finished for her, when it was clear that she wasn't going to comment on that aspect.

She gave him a sharp look.  "Yes, he is."

"Judging by his hair and beard, and his facial characteristics, his ancestry lies somewhere in the south-eastern kingdoms," Castiel remarked, drawing everyone's eyes to him.  "Difficult to see under all the filth, but he probably has olive or light brown skin."

"And you are?" Ellison asked pointedly.

"Castiel.  I'm training to become a Herald."

Ellison looked at Dean, who gave him a half-hearted shrug.  The only explanation he could possibly give was also the only explanation he had no intention of giving.  Not at this moment and in front of this audience, at any rate.  Preferably not at all.  Ellison turned to Sandburg, who also shrugged half-heartedly. 

Ellison sighed.  "Let's just get on with this."

In the meantime, the Healer had quietly summoned an assistant, a Healer-in-training, who brought a bucket of water and some swabs.  Between the two of them they washed the muck of the midden from the corpse.

"The state of decomposition would suggest he's been dead for as much as four days," she said.  Her tone and expression remained neutral, but Dean noticed the care with which she handled the dead man, the gentleness of the procedure.  "Rigor has passed off ... these marks on the lower legs are post-mortem, probably from animals interfering with the body, but he has other injuries that were most likely incurred prior to death."

"Looks like you were right about the skin colour," Tamara said in an aside to Castiel, who nodded slightly.

Dean had noticed something else.  "What's that big bruise on the chest?"

"It's circular," Healer Scully commented.  "A heavy impact site ..." she pressed around it with her fingertips, "and cracked ribs."

The shape suggested something more interesting to Dean.  "Is it a hoof-print?" he asked.

She shrugged.  "Perhaps.  The shape's right, and a kick from a horse would certainly be enough to inflict this kind of damage."

Castiel stepped closer, peering at it.  "Small, more likely a pony than a horse, and unshod I think.  The impact would be more pronounced if the animal was shod.  But for a man of this size ... could this be enough to have killed him?"

"Certainly.  Bigger men even than Captain Ellison have died after being kicked by horses.  An unlucky angle, lack of immediate appropriate aid – it's not uncommon."

"A pony," Dean said thoughtfully, and he looked at Ellison.  "Henryks's grandmother said Zeebru are about the size of a pony."

"That's a thought," Ellison said.  He looked at the Healer.  "What about the other injuries?"

"There are a number of older defensive-type wounds on the hands and forearms.  Some cuts and lacerations.  And a lot of scarring, some of it very old.  Whoever he is, he had a hard life."

"And the central cut?"

"It looks neat, no hesitation marks - whoever did it knew what they were doing.  Made with a very sharp blade, possibly a surgical knife.  You notice the hollowing of the abdomen and lower thorax?  There may be organs missing, but I'll need to open him up to be sure what's going on there."

"Anyone mind if I step out?" Sandburg asked.  When Dean turned to look at him, he was waxy-pale and sweating, but he was eyeing Ellison defiantly.  "You can mock me all you like later, Jim."

Ellison's eyes never left the corpse, but the corner of his mouth quirked into a smirk.  "Opportunity of a lifetime, Chief.  I'll catch up with you at the Watch House.  Tamara, you don't need to hang around either.  Bobby'll want to know what happened here."

"I won't fight you," she said grimly.  She nodded to Dean.  "Captain."

"Anyone else?" Ellison said, when they were gone.  He was looking at Castiel.

But Castiel looked no more disturbed by the corpse than Healer Scully.  "I have been a priest and an exorcist," he said, in reply to the question.  "The dead themselves hold no fears for me."

"Right."  Ellison shrugged and looked at the Healer.  "Let's get on with it then.  If we can conclusively say that someone harvested parts of the body, then there's a credible link with the dead animals that have been turning up, and our mystery meat case may have just turned into murder."

"If he was killed by a kick from a horse, then his death may have been an accident," Scully commented. She was stripping off the small pair of thin leather gloves she'd worn for the external examination, and replacing them with a sturdier pair that had canvas cuffs reaching nearly to her elbows.  Her assistant had to lace them into place for her.

"Don't change the fact that someone may have raided his body for useful parts after," Dean said.  "And they dumped him with the trash when they were done.  The least we're looking at is desecration of a dead body."

"I'm not disputing that, Captain, I'm just pointing out that we can't jump to the conclusion that this was a murder.  The evidence actually points the other way."  Scully studied the dead man for a moment or two, then sighed.  "Let's find out what's been done to him."

 

xXx

 

The sun was fully up when the three men stepped out of the Healing Temple over an hour later, and Her Majesty's subjects were going about their business, albeit somewhat more slowly than usual.  Dean could relate to that.

"We need to report this to Herald Asrel," Ellison said.  "We might not have enough yet to get authorisation to search premises, but she doesn't like having cases like this dropped on her with no warning.  I want to bring her up to speed, so there's no time wasted wading through the reports when we need to make a move."

"We should update the District Commander too," Dean said.  He tried to stand on his grimace at the thought of this; given a choice he wouldn't have faced either lady while still suffering from a mild hangover, but that was how much his life hated him.  "I'll come with you, if you don't mind me stopping off at the Roadhouse to put on a uniform."

"Sure.  We can get breakfast there while we're at it."

Dean wasn't sure he wanted breakfast after watching Healer Scully rummaging around in a partly decomposed body, but coffee would probably be a good idea if he was going to face a Herald and senior brass.

Castiel touched his elbow.  "I should collect Eslan and return Herald Maria's saddle to her," he said quietly.  "You'll let me know how this matter is concluded?"

"Always supposing we find out," Dean said pessimistically.  Conscious that Ellison was pointedly _not_ listening, he switched to Jkathan.  "Hey, I'm sorry about this.  I was hoping to have most of today free ..."

"It is what it is, and cannot be helped.  I will visit you soon."

"You _better_."  But Dean found a grin to say it with, and Castiel smiled as they parted.

Ellison waited until they'd walked the length of the street before casually asking, "There anything you want to tell me?"

At least he wasn't making it a demand.  Dean tossed around a couple of different answers in his head before finally settling on, "Why, is there something you want to tell me, Jim?"

Ellison chuckled.  "Oh no, that's not gonna happen until I've had a lot more beer."

"Well, so long as we ain't drinkin' it at the Roadhouse, you're on."

"I'll bear it in mind."

Ellen was in a good mood when they reached the Roadhouse Inn; she'd done particularly good business the day and night before.  She served Ellison herself while Dean ran up to his room to find a clean uniform.  He found Adam alone in the spare room, snoring robustly into his pillow with one arm dangling down onto the rug.  He wondered for a moment where Sam - and possibly Jessica - had got to, only to find that the pair of them had cheekily appropriated his (fractionally) larger bed in the main room. 

Oh well.  It wasn't as though Dean had needed it, and it had probably given Adam some much appreciated privacy.

They too were dead to the world despite the advancing day, and Dean extracted his clothes from the chest at the foot of his bed without disturbing them.  A quick wash in the laundry to remove a night of carousing and a couple of hours with a dead man's viscera, and he felt a hundred times better prepared to face the day.

"You got a hangover?" Ellen demanded when Dean walked back into the taproom.

"Had one.  It's mostly gone now."

"Here, this'll clear the last of it if anything will."  She pushed a bowl of something across the bar to him, and added a thick slab of trencher bread.

The spices hit Dean's nose from six feet away.  "Is that …?"

"Anaelia's fish stew, yes.  You're doing me a favour finishing it off, the smell gets annoying after a full day."

"Damn," Dean said admiringly, taking a seat and grabbing the spoon Ellen offered.  "I gotta find a way to introduce Anaelia to my grandma.  They must've been separated at birth."

"The same way you were separated from your tastebuds?" Ellison asked dryly, and he pointedly moved his stool further down the bar.  "Enjoy your digestion while you can."

"Are you kidding me?  This stuff is food for the gods, man."

"We worship very different gods, Winchester."  And Ellison turned his attention to his coffee and fried, honey-glazed pastry ring.

Fortified, the two of them set off again a half-candlemark later.  They found the District Commander in her office and broke the news of the potential escalation of the 'mystery meat' case.  She was, understandably, less than delighted.

"Do you have _any_ suspects yet?" she asked.

Dean opted to let Ellison answer that one. 

"We have a possibility," Ellison said, and he made a face.  "No evidence so far, though - nothing to justify a search in my opinion."

The Commander eyed him, then turned to Dean.  "Captain Winchester?"

"It's a really weak link," he admitted reluctantly.  "More than a hunch, but not by much.  Jim's right - we need more to go after this guy, if it is him."

"I don't like the idea that someone is removing human body parts for some unsavoury reason, regardless of whether the donor died a natural death," she said sourly.  "There are enough wild stories about cannibalism and dark magic rituals circulating about the lower city without this sort of thing actually happening.  We have enough problems, the gods know."

"We'll keep digging," Ellison assured her.

"Keep me updated.  And it would be a good idea to let Herald Asrel know what's afoot."

"She's our next stop, ma'am," Dean said.

Tracking the Herald down took time.  The city courts didn't sit during Festivals, of course, unless there was an extraordinary need, but Herald Asrel kept rooms in the Pieman's Yard Sector and was generally available if needed.  They eventually found her eating an early luncheon in the courtyard of a small inn, and delivered their unhappy news.  She received it with more equanimity than the District Commander, but she was older and had been a field Herald when she was younger.  Heralds out in the field saw all manner of horrors.

But like the District Commander, her focus was on the possible implications if word got out that a body had been robbed of its organs.  And Dean knew only too well that the rumours were a matter of 'when' and not 'if'.

"We need to put a lid on this one fast, gentlemen," she told them.  "Mis-sold meat is one thing, desecrating human bodies is another entirely.  Someone took those organs for a reason, and if you can find a lead let me know at once.  As a judge I can't be seen to involve myself too closely in the enquiries, but I have other colleagues who can step in if necessary."

"I'll put the word out among my people," Ellison said, when they were back out in the street, "but I doubt any of them have snitches who'll know where to look for trade in human parts."

Dean had had an uncomfortable thought about that.  "I can think of one person who might be able to offer some ideas," he said, "but …"

"What?"

"I don't think she'll talk to me.  We didn't hit it off when we met, and then I sicced the Lord Patriarch's people on her."

Ellison listened patiently while Dean explained the saga of Lady Kali, self-proclaimed living goddess of death.

"You sure get 'em in your sector, Winchester," he sighed, when Dean was done.  "But as it happens I know just the person to talk to her.  Sandburg'll lap up her brand of crazy."

Dean wondered if this was a good idea, but Sandburg had been a Watch Officer for longer than he had and despite appearances he was a tough little scrapper.  And if that wasn't enough, anyone laying a hand on him would face the retribution of Jim Ellison, who wasn't nearly as offhanded about his deputy as his casual manner suggested.

So he gave Ellison directions to Kali's current residence, and they split up to go back to their respective Watch Houses.

By the time Dean arrived at the Ropewalk Watch, Jody's team were just going off shift.  The pile of complaints forms in Rufus's tray on the front desk was a testament to the invigorating effect of Spring Festival on the petty criminals of the Strangers Quarter, as was the collection of people milling around both inside and outside the cramped reception area.

"Everything under control here?" Dean asked Jo, who was attempting to accept formal handover of the front desk from Rufus in between dealing with the long queue of people.

"Yessir," she said briskly.  "Nothing for you to worry about, Captain, except the two guys sitting on the bench there.  I told 'em you weren't officially on duty today, but they insisted on waiting for you."

Dean looked around and was puzzled to see two men dressed in the drab but respectable livery of grooms from some middle ranking establishment.  Then the older of the two raised his head to meet Dean's eyes, and it took all his self-control not to do a double-take.

_You gotta start announcing yourself,_ he told Kolsen, exasperated.

_Now where would the fun be in that?_

Dean nearly snorted aloud, but luckily his self-control was marginally better than that.  "Better see what they want, I guess," he said to Jo.

They stood up when he approached them; Kolsen was weirdly forgettable in the unfamiliar costume, and the second man Dean didn't recognise at all.  He was an inch or two shorter than Dean, and more muscular, with short dirty-blond hair and piercing blue eyes.  He could have been any age between his late twenties and early forties, and he had the kind of weathered, craggy face that gave no hint away of the thoughts behind it.

"Something I can do for you gentlemen?" Dean asked.

"Yes, thank you Captain," Kolsen said smoothly, "but perhaps somewhere quieter?"

"Sure, come through to my office."

Luckily, Ash had the day off so the office was empty, and it was mercifully quieter once Dean shut the door behind the three of them.  "I'm guessing you're not here to offer me a Festival blessing," he said, gesturing for them to take the two spare chairs in front of his desk.

"Perhaps we can take that as read," Kolsen agreed mildly.  "Castiel told me about the body found on Captain Ellison's watch last night."

Dean pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment.  "Of course he did."

"Do you believe it to be connected to the dead animal trade you told me of?"

"We think it might be," Dean admitted.  "I know a human body dumped in a midden doesn't seem like it's got much in common with the rest, but there were organs missing and a bunch of similarities to the way the body of the ape at Mama Tulip's was dismembered.  Plus the cause of death was a kick from something like a pony, which seems like too much of a coincidence seeing as the first lot of meat came from something that was pretty much a pony with a bad dye job."

"I see.  We're interested in the identity of the dead man."

"Too soon to say," Dean said at once, and Kolsen's companion shifted slightly in his seat.  He hadn't spoken a word yet, but there was a curious coiled tension in his body language that had Dean watching him warily.  "He don't look like a northerner, and he's no one I recognise from my sector.  I'm pretty sure I'd recognise him if I'd seen him around."

"Castiel described him as a dwarf with the colouring and characteristics of someone from one of the south-eastern kingdoms."

"Yeah - olive skin, dark curly hair and beard with a lot of grey in 'em.  Healer Scully reckoned he was in his fifties maybe.  Lot of scarring, like he'd had a tough life."

Kolsen exchanged tense looks with the other man for a moment, and Dean took the opportunity to covertly study the as-yet-unnamed stranger.  He was rubbing his hands together slowly, a controlled nervous gesture, and Dean's eyes were drawn to them.  He particularly noted the callused fingertips, calluses that he recognised from his own fingers - although his weren't nearly so well-developed.  The movement also briefly moved one sleeve and Dean's speculation was confirmed; despite his obvious comfort in the groom's costume, the man wore an arm-guard.  Whatever else he might be, he was first and foremost an archer.

Kolsen leaned forward, hands on his knees.  "I think we need to see the body, Captain.  Is that possible?  Or has he been removed for burial already?"

Dean had been expecting this.  "Healer Scully was still finishing her exam when we left, and I don't think Jim Ellison was expecting to apply for a burial order until tomorrow.  It's in his jurisdiction, so I don't mind taking you there but I'll have to tell him."

"I'm happy to speak to him with you," Kolsen said.

"Right."  Dean got up with a sigh.  "Let's go then."

 

xXx

 

The Healer and her assistant were just beginning to wrap the body for burial when Dean walked in with his two companions, and she was displeased at having to stop.  Then she set eyes on Kolsen and went very still for a moment, her expression tightening.

"We're truly sorry to interrupt," Kolsen told her, with a faint smile, "but we might be able to identify this man."

Scully gave him a hard look, then turned to her assistant.  "Danny, I'll deal with this.  Will you go and pack up my equipment please?"  When the young man had left, she turned back to Kolsen with a grimace.  "I should have known you'd be involved with something like this."

"On this occasion it's pure coincidence," he disclaimed. 

She didn't look convinced, but she let it go and at once drew the shroud back from the face of the dead man and removed the square of cloth that had been laid across it underneath.

Kolsen's silent companion immediately stepped forward, apparently unmoved by the smell from the corpse, and stared down at him for several long moments.

"Do you know him?" Kolsen asked softly.

"Yeah."  His voice was rough, clipped.  "It's Barzek.  He was a tumbler when he was young, but when he got older and his joints stiffened things got tougher for him."

"He was one of Carson's?"

"Him, and the rest of his family.  They were a novelty act - the Tiny Tumblers."  The man looked at Scully then to Dean.  "What's gonna happen to him?"

"He goes to the Paupers' Boneyard if no one claims him," Dean said, a little apologetically for he could tell that the man was upset despite his set expression.

"Just a hole in the ground, huh?" the man flung at him roughly.

"And Father Joe'll say prayers for him," Dean said, referring to the mendicant priest who tended to people who lived on the streets in lower Haven, "like he does for anyone who don't have family or friends to see 'em off."  He didn't take offence at the man's tone.  He'd seen too many distressed people in a similar position before, and knew the anger was for the circumstances rather than for him.

"Right."  The man gritted his teeth for a moment.  "I'll pay for his box and his burying.  But I want to know who did this.  Not how he died - getting kicked, that's just bad luck.  I want to know who carved him up and then threw him out like he was slops.  He - he didn't deserve that.  _No one_ deserves that."

"I got no argument with that."  Dean glanced warily at Kolsen.  "I don't have answers for you yet.  But we're working on it, and I want this asshole to go down just as bad as you do."

The man gave a short, sour laugh.  "Yeah, I seriously doubt that."

Dean bristled  "Hey now – "

"Enough!" Kolsen interrupted sharply.  "That was uncalled-for.  I'd remind you that Captain Winchester and the Watch have my full confidence.  If you doubt the difficult and frustrating nature of their work, I can arrange for you to spend some time trying it for yourself!"

To Dean's surprise, the other man flushed a dull red and ducked his head.  "Right.  Sorry."

Dean would take that apology.  "It's cool," he said. 

"Do you have any suspects?" Kolsen asked him in a milder tone.

"One, but it's shaky.  Jim and me, we already talked to the District Commander and Herald Asrel, but we've gotta get more before we try anything.  One of Jim's people is gonna check out a possible lead later today, might give us an idea who wanted the organs."

Kolsen nodded.  "Well, not to pre-empt things, Dean, but I'm thinking it's time you had some back-up from the Circle.  This provides a link to the other business I spoke to you about."

"Whoa there," Dean said, holding up a hand.  "Don't get me wrong, man, it's good to know you got our backs.  But this is Jim's case, more'n mine, and besides – you white-shirts start hanging about, it's gonna clue in the people we most don't want getting a clue.  You know?  And not just in this case."

Kolsen gave him a look.  "I like to think we can be a little subtler than that," he chided, plucking the front of his jerkin to make his point.

"Yeah, that'll work for just passing through without getting noticed, but anything deeper – you gotta live in this part of the city.  Trust me, folk here know when you're not one of us.  Even me, I've lived here more'n half my life and _still_ some of the elders pick on my accent and ask where I'm from."

"He's got a point," Kolsen's companion murmured.

To Kolsen's credit, he accepted this without a protest.  "Very well, we'll leave it for now.  You'll keep me informed?"

"Sure," Dean agreed.

"Good.  I'll mention the matter to my more senior colleagues, just in case and so we can be ready if you need us, but we'll hold off until you have more to go on."


	3. Chapter 3

Dean ended up putting in a full day's work after all, which was annoying because he doubted he would get the lost rest-day back.  He left the Watch House just as the mid-shift were arriving and trudged back to the Roadhouse with his mind fixed hopefully on some sort of pie for his supper.

The Roadhouse was humming with activity when he got there, which made him marvel anew at the resilience of the lower city's denizens, that they could spend a day and a night carousing to the limits of their ability, and yet still be ready for a regular evening's drinking the following night.  He had to force his way to the bar, and was studying Ellen's board in hopes of the aforementioned pie when the innkeeper herself got his attention.

"You got a visitor," she told him.

"I'm hoping I got two or three," he said, belatedly remembering Sam, Adam and Jessica. 

"They've gone out with Jo and a bunch of her rowdies.  This is a new face."  Ellen jerked a thumb over her shoulder, and Dean reluctantly took a look.

Kolsen's still-unnamed friend was sitting at the other end of the bar, placidly drinking from one of the Roadhouse's heavy glazed earthenware mugs.  He didn't look up and he wasn't engaging with anyone else, but he didn't look out of place either.  No one seemed to be paying any attention to him.

Dean sighed.  "Fine.  Don't suppose Anaelia made pie, did she?"

Ellen snorted. "The day after festival?  Dream on.  We got bread, cheese, cold roast pigeon, and soup."

"We're out of soup," her assistant Tamar said, from a little further down the bar.

Ellen raised her hands and shrugged.  "Bread, cheese, meat.  Your choice."

"I'll think about it."  Dean pushed his way through the throng until he fetched up next to his visitor.  He was flat out of subtlety, so - "What do you want?"

This guy had a lot of interesting mannerisms and body language going on.  For instance, he didn't look directly at Dean, rather he tilted his head slightly in his direction, but his eyes never left his mug.  Not that he seemed to miss anything.  "Buy you a drink?" he offered casually.

"Not in this tavern, you won't," Ellen said, before Dean could react.  "He drinks too much already."

"I _don't_ , because you won't let me," Dean retorted, but she was already heading off to answer another patron's summons.  "She's not actually my mother," he said, feeling that Ellen's behaviour merited some sort of explanation.

The other man snorted softly.  "I can buy you a drink somewhere else - doesn't have to be here."

Dean was torn.  On the one hand, he had no idea what was going on here, especially after their previous interactions; the best he could think was that this was something to do with Herald Kolsen, which was sufficiently vague to make him wary.  On the other hand, he really wanted pie and he wasn't going to get it at the Roadhouse.

"Fine, but it'd better be someplace I can get hot food."

The man nodded.  "That works."

They left the Roadhouse, and the man lapsed into a steady silence that Dean was beginning to think was a feature of him.  "You got a name?" he asked, because while the silence wasn't uncomfortable exactly, it was beginning to feel weird.  The man shot him an odd look.  "We weren't introduced.  And I'm fine with not knowing your real name, but _some_ kind of name would make this less creepy."

That got him a smirk.  "Most folk call me Hawkeye."

Dean doubted that was the name his mother had given him, and he was entirely the wrong ethnicity to be one of the legendary Hawkbrothers of the Pelagirs, so it had to be a nickname. He shrugged inwardly; if the guy wanted to be called Hawkeye, he would call him Hawkeye.  No skin off Dean's nose.

They fetched up in another tavern some streets away from Hemp Alley, one where the beer was nearly black but drinkable and the innkeeper's wife was happy to tell Dean that they had hot meat pies aplenty.  Dean found them a corner table with good sight-lines, something he suspected his companion was even more concerned about than he was, and they settled in with their tankards while they waited for the food to arrive.

"You want to tell me what this is about?" Dean asked, before Hawkeye could settle in to mimic a beer-drinking statue.

When he actually looked him in the eye, Hawkeye had eyes that seemed to drill through Dean's head.  "Phil's taken a real shine to you," he stated.

Dean blinked.  "Phil?"

Hawkeye's eyebrows went up.  "Phil Kolsen."

"Kolsen isn't his first name?"  He was mildly surprised by that.

"Heralds pick a name when they're Chosen.  Most of 'em use their first name, some use first and family name."  Hawkeye shrugged.  "Some, like Phil and Sitwell, use their last name.  And I heard there's a few who change it completely."

"Huh. You work with him?"

"Sometimes."

"And you're here talking to me now because ...?"

"Because you said you had a suspect."

That made sense, unfortunately.  "If you think I'm gonna give you a name, you're out of luck.  I know fuck all about you, and I don't even know what your connection to the dead guy is.  If I'm not about to spill it all to Kolsen, I'm sure as hell not gonna spill it all to you."

Hawkeye didn't seem to be offended or discouraged by this.  "Yeah, well maybe I can persuade you."

Dean silently said goodbye to the hope of a second beer.  Too risky under the circumstances.  "Forget it."

Hawkeye sighed.  "I'm getting an idea why Phil likes you.  You're mouthy but honest."

"You're welcome."

He grinned unexpectedly at this, and it took years off his face.  "You're kind of an asshole too."

"It takes one to know one," Dean retorted.

Hawkeye raised his tankard to him.  "I'll drink to that."

The landlady arrived and laid out their dishes on the table between them.  When she was gone again, Dean said, "Still not giving you a name."

"Eat your pie while I try to convince you."

Dean sighed, but rummaged in his belt pouch for his fork and spoon.  "Look – "

"Eat.  You said the suspect's shaky, and you and the other captain need more evidence before your commander and the Herald-Justice'll have reason to let you go after him."  Dean blinked at him again.  "I pay attention, Winchester.  I'm wondering if there's a way to get that evidence."

"Yeah, no, we're not doing it that way.  Back up a-ways and start talking."

Hawkeye's brow furrowed.  "About what?"

"About why this is so important to you, and why I should trust you," Dean said flatly.  "That'll do for a start.  You can tell me how you know Kolsen while you're at it.  And what he's likely to do to both of us when he finds out what you're doing here."

Hawkeye gave him a hard look, then fished a small leather pouch out of his sleeve.  Dean tensed, but it turned out to hold the other man's own fork and spoon.  "You _are_ an asshole."

"Never said I wasn't.  Talk to me."

Hawkeye stared at him.  "You've been hanging around Phil too long."

"Nope.  He hangs around my sector like a creepy stalker, pretending to be someone's bean-counter."  Dean dug his fork into the crisp, short pastry of his pie and the jet of delicious steam it released almost scalded his eyeballs.  "I've seen his office.  Shouldn't he be too busy to rough it in the Strangers Quarter so much?"

"He likes the hands-on approach," Hawkeye said, sounding nonplussed.

There was a pause while they both risked burning their mouths on their food.

"So what do you want to know about him?" Hawkeye asked eventually.

Dean shrugged.  "Anything.  He knows too much about me already.  Wouldn't mind evening the score a little on that front.  I mean, I spent some quality time with his Companion a while back, but it's not like she talked to me - "

"Wait – you touched Lola?"

Dean raised his eyebrows.  "Kinda hard to groom her without touching her."

Hawkeye was wide-eyed.  " _No one_ touches Lola.  It's a thing."

"What, not even you?"

"I'm different."  He sounded faintly miffed.  "He must really like you."

"He didn't seem to have a problem with it.  And she trod on my foot when I missed a spot," Dean felt compelled to add.

" _Any_ of the Companions'll do that."

"Great. Stop changing the subject."

Hawkeye sighed.  "I spent the first sixteen years of my life, or thereabouts, in a circus.  Barzek and his family were one of the acts.  He was kind to me, all right?  It was a tough life and my parents were long gone.  I wouldn't be here today if Barzek and a couple of other folk hadn't looked out for me."  He pointed his fork at Dean warningly.  "Not saying he was an angel, 'cause he wasn't.  Just that he was decent to me when it mattered.  And no matter what he did, he didn't deserve – _that._ "

"Fair enough," Dean agreed.  "What was he doing in Haven?"

Hawkeye snorted.  "Like I know.  Last time I saw him was in Hardorn and we were heading in opposite directions.  That was years ago."

"Did he ever work with animals?"

"You live in the circus, sooner or later you work with animals.  He did roustabout work – everything from beast-wrangling to fixing broken wagons," he clarified, when Dean frowned.  "His family owned a bunch of miniature ponies when I knew him, it was part of their act.  Small people, small horses, you know?"

Dean didn't really, but he had an imagination.

So many questions.  But only one seemed relevant at that moment: "You think he was involved in anything illegal?"

"Probably," Hawkeye said, unperturbed.  "Pretty much everyone involved in the circus has something shady going on.  It's that kind of life."

Dean raised his eyebrows.  "You too?"

There was an edge to Hawkeye's smile.  "Buddy, you have no idea."

Dean thought about Jim Ellison's suspicion that Kolsen was Valdemar's "spymaster", and how Kolsen had said that he had a contact with links to circuses.

Right.

"So," he said, after he'd taken a couple more mouthfuls of pie, "Kolsen."

Hawkeye sighed.  "He's the Lord Marshal's Herald.  It's all about defence of the realm for him.  To be honest, I've no idea why he hangs around the Watch so much – the city is the Seneschal's business."

"We're first in line for conscription if there's a war," Dean commented.

"You think he's that involved with every possible grunt?  Seriously?  Come on!  What are your commanders for?  The day they start conscripting, the only questions the Privy Council asks are "How many are there?" and "Are they fit to march?"  Kolsen's all about information and strategy.  If he's hanging around, it's because there's something down here that's got his attention."

Dean tried to ignore the _drilling_ stare that accompanied this, because he couldn't work out why Kolsen's interest seemed to annoy Hawkeye so much.  "From what he told me, there was a circus got into trouble just over the border with Menmellith a while back.  And I'm guessing that idea came from _you_."

"Maybe."  It was Hawkeye's turn to concentrate on his meal for a few moments.  "Lower city's a cesspit, I gotta say," he commented casually.  "Never knew before how many kinds of people you got down here.  Folk from all over the world, huh?  Probably with a whole bunch of ideas about how everything should really work, and nowhere to go with 'em."

"Probably bugs the hell out of some people in the upper city," Dean said affably.

"'Specially when your great-great-granddaddy's great-great-granddaddy was something special to King Who-the-fuck-ever and your whole damn family's just so _important_ ," Hawkeye agreed.  "Last thing you want is a bunch of foreigners coming into Valdemar, making a mess and breeding everywhere."

There was something a little pointed about this comment that piqued Dean's interest.  "Someone actually say that to you?"

The corner of Hawkeye's mouth twitched.  "Not me.  I'm like you -"  He gestured between himself and Dean.  "Sure, I'm common as hell, but I look the business.  Some folk ... not so much.  You'd be surprised."

Dean considered that.  Thanks to his dealings with the previous Commander of his district, he knew the attitudes of some 'born and bred' Valdemarans better than he liked.  It was a shot in the dark, but - "Captain May?"

Hawkeye's smirk turned into a genuine, if reluctant, smile.  "Yeah, now I'm getting it.  You're sharper than you get credit for."

"Does she kick the shit out of them?"  Asking the question was preferable to stressing over the other man's remark.

"You can rub some people's noses in their shit and they'll still claim it's gold dust," Hawkeye said, and that was the gods' own truth as Dean knew only too well.

Still ... "So she's a captain in the Palace Guard, and what – the Weaponsmaster?  I get that's a pretty important job, but is it really that big a deal to people that she looks a little different to what they're used to?"

Hawkeye didn't answer straightaway.  He stared into his tankard for a beat, thinking, before he raised his eyes to Dean's face again.  "What do you know about the queen?"

"Nothing," he said at once.  Then he amended this.  "I know her name's Skye, and there's a regency because she's too young to rule in her own right.  That's pretty much it."

"Captain May came to Valdemar in the same train that brought the queen's mother here.  They're from the same place on the other side of the Eastern Empire – the same clan even, I think."

Dean thought about this ... then he had to sit back and take a slow breath as a whole host of associations burst in on him with this one small piece of information, like the one tile in a game of Four Walls that made it possible to build a whole structure out of a random handful of other tiles.

The information about the queen wasn't even the most interesting detail.  No, _this_ was the piece of information that made sense of Captain May's story about her mother and the offended powerful person that had resulted in Mama Tulip being all but banished to the Strangers Quarter.  Holy shit.

"Who is the queen's mother?" he asked.

"Dowager Princess Jiaying," Hawkeye said.  Not for the first time, his eyes flicked around the crowded, noisy taproom, although no one seemed to be paying them the slightest attention.  "She married the king's only surviving son, Prince Calvin, but he wasn't a Herald and he died when Skye was just a little anyway."

"So lemme guess – Mama's real keen to control the queen?"

"Not just her.  There's the Queen Dowager too.  _She's_ from Rethwellan, and some people think she's a better bet than a woman from the Empire."  Hawkeye's expression was bland.  "She and the princess spend a lot of time at each other's throats and scheming with their pals.  Then there's the people who don't want _any_ foreigners controlling the queen, and the ones who don't think a mongrel princess should be queen at all."

Dean frowned.  "There any other candidates?  Oh wait – I've met Herald Raylor.  He's the Heir, right?"

"Yeah, but he was born on the wrong side of the blanket, like all the rest of Prince Calvin's kids, so he's not a serious bet unless something goes wrong."

Dean didn't need to ask what _something goes wrong_ could mean.  This just kept getting better and better.  "Apart from Raylor, who else is there?"

"Herald Ansel, Herald Maria – it's not an accident they're senior members of the Circle.  Lady Pepper Stark; and she has three kids.  And there's Phil of course.  He's the oldest."

Dean's brain screeched to a halt.  "What?"

"Kolsen is the oldest of Prince Calvin's bastards."  Hawkeye's expression went from impatient to gleeful as he registered Dean's shock.  "You didn't know that?  Yeah, no – he wouldn't tell you, would he?  He's an asshole too."  This last was said with an offhand affection.

Dean didn't know where to start. "What ... what the _fuck_ is a prince doing running around the lower city dressed like – like a penpusher?" he hissed.  "Is he crazy?"

"Sure."  Hawkeye shrugged, amused.  "He's a Herald.  They're all crazier than a bag of cats.  And he's not a prince, though I'd pay good money to see you call him that to his face."  Something in Dean's expression must have made an impression, though, because the smirk slid off his face.  "On second thought, no, don't ever try calling him a prince.  He's got issues with it – like, for real, he _hates_ it.  He's not like the others, his mom wasn't anybody fancy, and he grew up real poor.  The first time he met his old man was after he was Chosen, and they say the prince tried to deny it until the Queen admitted she knew all about Phil.  Big mess, and he's ... well I guess he's kinda sore about it."

Dean considered this and discovered that it was one feat of imagination that was a bit beyond him by this point.  Nothing he had seen of Kolsen so far suggested someone who was 'sore' about being a royal bastard – but then he wouldn't have guessed Kolsen was related to royalty anyway.  He was certainly higher on the social scale than Dean by a wide margin, but outside of the lower city most people fell into that category.  He was a Herald – and they occupied their own niche, wherever they went.

This was all beside the point.

Dean scraped up the last tasty morsels of his pie and pushed his empty dish to one side, belatedly wondering if he had enough coin in his pouch to pay for the meal.  His memory of how much he'd spent the night before was a tad sketchy, and he never kept a slate anywhere but at Ellen's.

"Look," he said, "if you want to bury your friend, it's all good and I can give Penny Street Watch your direction.  Herald Asrel will probably release his body tomorrow.  Where should I tell 'em to contact you?"

There was a fraction of a hesitation before Hawkeye said "I work in the Palace stables."

Dean gave him a sceptical look.  "And you wear an arm guard – why?"

Hawkeye's expression sharpened warily.  "What do you know about that?"

"I saw it when you were in my office; I know 'em because my family are forester-folk, the bow's my weapon."  Dean grimaced.  "Used to be, anyway, before we came to Haven."

That got him a look of guarded interest.  "You any good?"

"'Bout as good as I can be, practicing once a ten-day on the butts at Water Street Barracks."

"What's your draw weight?"

The grimace became more of a wince.  "I reckon the bigger of my bows has a maximum draw of seventy or eighty pounds maybe?  I gotta work up to it and I'm not sure I get a full draw with it most days.  And believe me, I know about it the day after I've used it – wouldn't be able to handle either of 'em if I didn't string 'em every day.  The smaller one probably draws around sixty.  But they're hunting bows, they're not made to bring down anything bigger than a small deer.  My grandpa had this one bow he swore drew a hundred and twenty or more when he was young, and the elders in our village said he'd brought down elk and aurochs with it in the old country."

Hawkeye's face relaxed into genuine interest.  "I've got a couple longbows that draw one-eighty, but I have to work with them every day to get the best out of them."

"One- _eighty?_ "  Dean whistled softly, looking at the other man with respect. 

Hawkeye shrugged.  "There's a squad in the Queen's Bowmen can draw one-eighty any day.  It's not all about the draw, you gotta be accurate too. I reckon we've got a square dozen right now can call themselves snipers, and they're all Heralds.  But most Heralds use recurves, they're easier to carry on circuit."

"Never had an opportunity to try a recurve," Dean commented.  "I know Cas uses one."

"Cas?"

"Castiel, a pal of mine – he's a Herald trainee."

Hawkeye squinted for a moment.  "Dark hair, blue eyes, used to be a priest?  Yeah, I know him.  He was probably a pretty good horse-archer with that recurve he brought with him.  He just needs to learn a few extra tricks with his Companion."

Dean looked at him, amused.  "So you work in the Palace stables, huh?"

The guarded expression was back at once.  "Sure, I work in the stables."

"When you're not working ... where?"

"I teach a little too."

"Archery, maybe?  To Heralds?"

Hawkeye declined to answer this, signalling for one of the tavern's servers to refill their mugs.  When that had been done, he gave Dean an assessing sort of look.  "So how good's your aim?"

"Drop by sometime and we'll find out."  Dean was realistic about his abilities though; he knew only too well that he never got enough practice to be anything like the archer he'd shown the promise of being as a boy.  "Prepare to be disappointed."

Hawkeye shrugged.  "Eh.  I can tell the difference between someone who genuinely has terrible aim and someone who doesn't get enough practice.  You use any other distance weapons?"

"Not since I was a little."

"Sling?"

"Sure, and spear.  You learn early on the border, unless you want to eat nothing but nuts and pottage for the rest of your life."

Hawkeye snorted a little at this.  There was a pause, then in a different, quieter tone, he said "You're not gonna tell me who this asshole is, are you?"

"Nope," Dean agreed.

"How good do you think your chances are of getting him?"

And that was the kicker.  Dean knew Crowley, but not as well as Jim Ellison did.  He trusted Ellison's judgement and Ellison had not seemed hopeful of pinning anything on Crowley.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Like I said before, I could help you get that evidence you need – no, hear me out!  I gotta lot of tricks up my sleeve, Winchester, I can be in and out of places without folk ever knowing I was there."

"Tricks you're prepared to swear to in front of a magistrate?"  Hawkeye was silent.  "That's what I thought.  Look, buddy, I got a trick or two I can't use for the same reason.  I get that you're frustrated.  Believe me, so am I.  But with this guy we gotta do it right, or he walks and what's more, he'll be laughing in our faces when he does.  And it'll be twice as hard to pin him the next time he pulls some shit."

"Right, right ..."  Hawkeye blew out a breath and sat back.  "You'll let me know if you get him?"

"You got my word on that."

"Fine.  Then I guess all I can do is make arrangements for Barzek's burying.  Don't suppose you can recommend a local undertaker?"

Dean opened his mouth – and shut it again.

A really terrible idea had just popped into his head.

 

xXx

 

Whenever Dean got a new recruit into the Watch, one who was younger than himself, he made a point of sitting them down and telling them about all of the shitty things they would be expected to deal with in the course of their career – all the things, in fact, that the recruiters at Headquarters were careful to gloss over.  The older recruits were usually already seasoned by the time he got them, many of them having had eventful tours of duty in the Guard or adventurous alternative lives that had somehow washed them up in Haven with unusual skills and nowhere else to use them.  But the younger ones were sometimes more starry-eyed and hopeful.

Inevitably, the conversations he had with those younger recruits involved the unwelcome news that, yes, they would have to deal with dead bodies, probably within their first week on the job, and yes, it was going to be unpleasant regardless of how the person had died.  Quite possibly indescribably unpleasant, depending on how long the body had been waiting for someone to find it.  And yes, they would have to deal with the host of people whose business was death, some of whom had developed offensive mechanisms for coping with the less pleasant aspects of their work.

Dean usually left the giving of actual examples to someone like Sergeant Murgo, who had a long career and an inexhaustible supply of gruesome stories to horrify innocent recruits with.  To his credit, most of his stories were only _lightly_ embellished, but this was little comfort when you considered the appalling number of them that involved undertakers and grave-diggers who had been arrested for grave robbing and necrophilia.

Digressions aside, the point was: The job involved an awful lot of death; no matter how clean and mundane the death in question, it was always unpleasant to deal with; and when you dealt with death, you had to deal with the weirdoes who made death their life's work one way or another.

And that inevitably led to Crowley, who was mentioned not because he was the only undertaker working in the lower city (he wasn't) but because his sense of humour, and that of his employees, was bound to upset the over-sensitive.  Or even well-balanced people with a fairly thick skin.

Crowley was a middle-aged man, whose predominant features were a slightly receding hairline, eyes that missed nothing, and a polite, ingratiating manner that concealed a truly toxic personality.  Dean suspected he wasn't Valdemaran by birth, although he had nothing to back up that assumption.  In fact, a great deal of what people assumed about Crowley was unsubstantiated at best; most never had a reason to question that, but Dean had known him since his days as a runner out of Exiles Gate Watch and had come to observe that Crowley seemed to have a lot of reach across the lower city for someone with such a modest business presence.  Most of what he could say he actually _knew_ about the man had come from Jim Ellison, who of course had known him before he set up shop in Haven as an undertaker.

The best way to deal with Crowley, Dean had found, was to let him get his little digs in and even play up to them if possible, distasteful as that might be.  A Crowley deprived of his jollies was a Crowley who was liable to be difficult.  There was a delicate line to be drawn, however, between going along with him enough that he would be satisfied, and going too far and encouraging him.  And of course, you had to be exceptionally careful when you were accompanying the bereaved.  It didn't do to be seen to be insensitive – especially if they were the sort whose distress was potentially expressed through aggression.

Dean was already aware that Hawkeye's response to grief was anger, and he hoped that he'd primed him enough that he wouldn't overreact if Crowley was in a funny mood.  Some surliness was appropriate; too much could be counterproductive.

In the event, when they arrived at his workshop in the late afternoon of the following day Crowley was amiable and business-like, but not especially ebullient, which was probably all to the good.  Even so, it wasn't an unalloyed pleasure.

"Ah, Captain!" Crowley hailed him.  He gave Dean a sharp smile.  "What a mixed delight.  Always a pleasure to see you walk into my humble establishment, of course, but I can't help but hope that one day you'll come through that door feet first.  Preserving those classic features for your loved ones would be such a tempting challenge to a man of my calling." 

Not punching Crowley for some of his comments was habit by now, fortunately.  Dean smirked at him coyly.  "Wouldn't deprive you, Crowley.  Every time I get called out to a punch-up, I warn 'em to watch the face."

That earned him a sarcastic chuckle.  "Of course you do.  Now, how can I help the good gentlemen of the Watch today?"

At least he wasn't in a mood to string it out.  Dean introduced Hawkeye and explained their errand.  Crowley was all sympathy, which Dean told himself only sounded false to him because he knew the man too well.  It probably didn't seem false to people who were grieving.

Then he asked the important question: "Have the bearers brought the body from the temple yet?  They should have delivered it by now."

The bearers were under strict instructions not to arrive until Dean and Hawkeye were in place, because Dean wanted to get a look at Crowley's face when he set eyes on the dead man.  So it was no surprise when Crowley apologetically demurred.

"Oh.  Well, maybe we could look at options with your box-maker while we wait for 'em to turn up?"

This was readily agreed to, and after Crowley had given a minion instructions to get the embalming room set up, he showed them through to the carpenters' workshop.

Ellen had been right, Dean noted as Crowley's carpenter took Hawkeye aside to show him some samples.  The workshop was stacked high with the cheapest sort of coffins and although it was currently fairly quiet, there was an air of more activity on the premises than Dean usually registered around the place.  The number of coffins was a surprise, because in the lower city even a cheap coffin could be too pricey for most customers; just a shroud was more common.  And although it was very faint, there was an unfamiliar smell about the place that pinged a number of alarms in the back of Dean's mind.

Cautiously, he lowered his mental shields a fraction.  This was risky, as the Heralds had warned him repeatedly, because you could never know if there was someone Gifted within range, and for someone like Dean, whose training was minimal and basic, it could leave him horribly vulnerable to attack.  But he wanted to get a feel for what was going on in Crowley's business, and with Crowley himself if possible.

Except that Crowley was like a brick wall, practically a dead spot to Dean's MindSpeech.  Now that could mean that he was simply mind-blind, like Adam, but it was far more likely that he was tightly shielded – which in itself was interesting.  Stretching himself out a little further afield, Dean discovered that Hawkeye was equally dead to his senses (less of a surprise, but still unexpected), but the carpenter was on edge and so was everyone else in the building to varying degrees.  There were also far more people on the premises than the bare half-dozen who were registered in Crowley's employment, and certainly more than Dean had expected.  Most of them were men.

It might look odd if he didn't say anything.  "Lot of coffins.  Business booming?"

"Well, you know how it is," Crowley said amiably.  "Death is one of the few certainties in life, and we've had a hard winter."

"Ain't that the truth," Dean acknowledged.

"I must confess, Captain," Crowley said, "I'm a little surprised to see you here.  Isn't that temple in Penny Street's jurisdiction?"

"Eh?  Oh, yeah."  Dean nodded rapidly.  "Call it a professional courtesy – this poor guy was drowning his sorrows in the Roadhouse last night, and asked if I could recommend somebody."  He raised his hands in a what-do-you-do gesture.  He hesitated, then drew Crowley a little to one side and lowered his voice.  "Not that I didn't already know about his pal.  I was at the temple when they brought him in."

"Indeed – am I to infer from this that I should prepare for two new guests?"

"What - ?  Heh, no.  Well, not unless you arrange funerals for horses as well."

Crowley's chuckle was polite but held no warmth.  "I've had stranger requests, Captain, but I limit myself to my fellow mankind.  More profitable, if you'll pardon such a crass observation."

Dean shrugged.  "It is what it is.  We all gotta eat."

"And satisfy the demands of our rapacious relatives."

Dean wasn't sure what 'rapacious' meant, but he could hazard a guess.  "You too, huh?"

"You have no idea."  Crowley paused, then said delicately, "Would it be unforgivably nosy to ask why you were at a temple outside your own sector, looking at dead horses, Captain?"

It was the opening Dean had been hoping for, and the main reason why he and not Ellison was here.  No one – least of all Crowley – would believe the upright Captain Jim Ellison would gossip about Watch business with, well, _anyone_.  And anyone who knew him knew that Sandburg (who definitely was a gossip) was too cautious to let slip anything that was actually useful.  But the very young and relatively inexperienced Captain Winchester?  He might just be stupid enough to let something drop in conversation.

He shrugged again, then gave Crowley a sideways look and tiny smirk.  "If you ask me, it's a whole bunch o' nothing."  Crowley raised his eyebrows, so he expanded on this.  "If you listened to Jim's crew, they'd have you think some idiot out there is sellin' folk horsemeat and tellin' 'em it's _unicorn_."

He snorted his opinion of this, and Crowley gave him a toothy smile.  "Oh, I don't know – some people will swallow anything, if you'll pardon the pun."

"And pay stupid money for it too!  Well, if you can't tell a hoof from a trotter, you get what's coming to you, if you ask me.  A horse is a horse.  And I know pig meat when I see it too."  Almost as an afterthought, he asked, "You ever met that Healer Jim's got in tow?  Short, curly red hair, attitude?"

"Healer Wells?"  Crowley's eyebrows shot up again.  "I believe I have heard of her, now you mention it.  I understand she's full of ideas."

"She's full of _somethin'_."  Dean shook his head, grinning.  "Her and Sandburg make a pair."

"I take it she has ideas about the – ah – unicorn meat?"

"Never heard a bigger load of bull in my life," Dean told him.  "And I've seen some scams."

"No one will ever forget the smoked oysters," Crowley agreed.

"You didn't waste any money on that shit, did you?  Man, if you're looking for pick-me-ups – "

"Ah, thank you, but no.  I manage."

Dean winked at him.  "I hear ya.  Still – if you've got the coin and you're lookin' for a little _lift_ , I hear good things about Mama Tulip."

"Let's just say I'm ahead of you there, Captain." 

"You dog!"  Dean looked thoughtful for a moment.  "Now that's one thing you never see on the menu in Valdemar.  Why is that?  My grandma said they used to eat it back in the old country, though she didn't rate it much."

"We're more sentimental about our canine friends, perhaps," Crowley suggested.

"I guess."

"I take it you don't buy the unicorn story?"

Dean stared at him.  "Would _you?_ "

"Well no, but I'm a sad old cynic, as anyone will tell you.  Is it really such a mystery?  After all, as you so eloquently put it, a horse is just a horse."

"Yeah, well if you believe Sandburg and the Healer, _this_ horse had stripes."

"Stripes," Crowley said flatly.

"I know, right?  Crazy!  I told 'em to their faces, someone's pullin' their dicks for the hell of it, but they weren't having it."  Dean whistled softly through his teeth.

"What sort of unicorn has stripes?"

"What sort of _horse_ has stripes?"

"I have no idea!"

"Well it doesn't, does it?  Like I said, someone's pulling their dicks.  I mean, how hard is it to paint black stripes on a white horse with dye?"

"Grey."

Dean blinked at him.  "Huh?"

"The usual term for a white horse is 'grey'," Crowley said.  "Probably to distinguish them from Companions, which are genuinely white."

"Whatever, man, the point is that the whole thing was a fake.  I seem to be the only one who sees that," he added grumpily.  "I've said from the start, the whole damn mess sounds like someone's bright idea to dump a bunch of rancid meat into the market, but no one ever listens to me.  Jim reckons he's got a solid lead and he's closing in on 'em - good luck to him, I say."

What Crowley might have said to this was academic, for the bearers finally arrived from the temple with Barzek's body.  Crowley went to direct them into the embalming room, and Dean and Hawkeye followed him.  Dean shot a quick glance at Hawkeye while the bearers transferred the covered corpse onto a stone slab, but there was nothing in the other man's face but the grim expression of grieving man braced to do his duty by his friend.

Dean thought he detected a trace of hesitation in Crowley when he saw the unexpected size of the body; but that could easily have been anyone's reaction, given that he had been told to expect an adult male.  Then he drew the shroud back from the face.

Dean saw his expression freeze for a split second, but that was all.  But if he hadn't still had his shields half lowered he would have missed the rest.

Crowley was good, without a shadow of a doubt, but like Dean he wasn't a Herald, and wherever he had got his training – if, indeed, he had actually been trained to shield – it wasn't anything like as good as the training Heralds received.  Dean _felt_ the burst of shock and alarm when he set eyes on Barzek's face, and just in time he slammed his own shields shut again.  When Crowley looked up at him sharply, Dean's face showed only polite enquiry.

"Unusual," Crowley said, and both his expression and the tone of his voice were casual to the point of indifference.

"What is?" Hawkeye demanded, quick to take offense in defence of his friend.

"Unusual to see a gentleman of such unique stature," Crowley replied smoothly.  "You may safely leave his care in my hands, sir – he will be treated with all the respect he deserves."

Hawkeye seemed mollified by this.

"Now, if you would care to give me your direction, I'll send someone to notify you when your friend is properly coffined.  Shall we say the morning after next for the burial?  There is a very pleasant space free in the Lady's Cemetery ..."

 

xXx

 

"What now?" Hawkeye asked, when they were a decent distance from Crowley's workshop.

"Now we wait, and see if he takes fright," Dean said, and he glanced up at the sun. 

Even if this went the way they were hoping, it was going to be a long day to get through and an even longer night to follow.

 

xXx

 

Some parts of the city didn't really slow down at night, but the area around Crowley's business was full of workshops of one sort or another, including a tannery, and after dusk it was unusual to see any of them occupied – artificial light of the quality required to keep them operating after dark was expensive.  Crowley's workshop was no different; anyone who died in the night would not be brought to him until the morning, and his mortuary was situated discreetly enough that what he did there could not easily be overlooked.

Which was all well and good when you were dealing with an honest man, Dean thought, but it made things a little trickier when you were trying to monitor someone who potentially had quite a lot to hide. 

Just as well, then, that his own line of business made perching on a nearby roof something he was not unused to, even if he didn't particularly like it.  Ellison, while perfectly fit and capable of climbing on roofs, was a tad too big to be safe on the local pottery tiles, and Sandburg vehemently claimed not to have a head for heights.  That left Dean, Jody, Megan and Jo to take the high lookouts, and thanks to MindSpeech Dean knew exactly what Jody and Megan's opinions on the subject were.  He couldn't decide if Jo's obvious thrill for the chase was better or worse.

He and Ellison had people spread out around the nearby streets, covering all potential exit routes.  And despite the shuttered windows and lack of any betraying lights, Dean already knew there were at least a dozen people in Crowley's premises, plus some other ... mental rustlings ... that he didn't know quite what to make of. 

He really hoped something interesting would happen soon.  It was cursed cold up on this roof, and it was covered in moss and moist bird crap besides.  He also wished there was another MindSpeaker working with them, because it would make coordinating everything ten times easier  –

_Then I guess it's your lucky night, huh?_

Dean froze.  That was _not_ Castiel or Kolsen.

_Relax.  It's me,_ the familiar-yet-unfamiliar 'voice' said. 

_Hawkeye?_   This was both a surprise and – not.

_Yeah._

_What the fuck are you doing here, man?  You can't be involved if we're gonna convict this asshole!_

_Relax, will you?  I won't interfere.  I'm just observing for Phil._

Lying mind to mind took considerable skill, Herald Ansel had told Dean, and now he could see why.  Hawkeye wasn't lying precisely, but there was a subtle shading to what he said that Dean picked up on at once.  _And?_

That got him a twinge of irritation from the other man.  _And nothing._

_Bullshit!_

_Look, I want to be sure they don't do anything to Barzek._

_I told you, he'll get a proper burial no matter what happens._

_And I think that asshole we left him with doesn't have any limits on the shit he's willing to pull._

That was an uncomfortably good point, one Dean couldn't argue with.  The kind of person who could coolly take a dead man's organs and throw his body in a midden was someone with a perilously low threshold of decency.  Plus –

_What?_   Hawkeye demanded at once.

It wasn't easy to hide things from a MindSpeaker either.  _Sandburg paid a visit to a woman in my sector, someone I thought might know what the missing organs could be used for._

Lady Kali had made a considerable impression upon Sandburg.  She hadn't been happy at all when he'd told her why he was there, and although she'd given him a couple of leads that even now Sandburg and Dean's First Lieutenant, Henryks, were chasing up, she'd been absolutely furious about the whole business.  The District Commander was probably going to hear about it in the morning, although if tonight's operation went as they hoped, Kali's offended feelings were going to be the least of anyone's worries.

_Let's just say if Henryks and Sandburg hit paydirt, Herald Asrel's gonna have a very busy day tomorrow._

_Well, it's not like it's news that someone's buying this stuff,_ Hawkeye commented after a pause, but he sounded grim.

Dean was about to respond to this when he caught a flash of white on a roof further down; Jody signalling that she'd seen something.

_Hold on, I think things are moving,_ he told Hawkeye.

_Rear gate's opening_ , Hawkeye replied tersely.

_Wherever you are, man, stay put!_

_No fear.  I do better up high._

Dean signalled hastily to Megan and Jo, then began to make the perilous descent from his own perch, moving as fast as he dared.  He and Ellison had briefed their people most emphatically about _not_ stepping away from their assigned posts; Crowley's premises had too many potential exit points to leave even the smallest window unwatched.  Dean prayed now that the constables had paid attention.

He was still eight feet from the ground when Hawkeye snapped _You need to see this!_ and did something that felt almost exactly like being grabbed by the neck and forced to look at something.  Dean's eyes crossed, his vision wobbled sickeningly for a moment, and then he was looking out of someone else's eyes down into a distant courtyard that was bizarrely luminous despite the lack of actual lights.

_What the fuck - ?_

_You can freak out later!  Look at what they're doing!_

The yard at the rear of Crowley's workshop was stuffed with several carts full of stacked coffins, and a whole lot more ponies than he could surely have any use for.  Men were bustling around quietly, working on the animals' tack and doing something to their hooves.  A couple of the creatures seemed to be draped in blankets or tarpaulins, and at least three of them were less than half the size of the others.

_They're muffling their feet and tack,_ Hawkeye said.  _Someone doesn't want to be heard._

_Yeah, that's not suspicious at ALL._

And just as abruptly, Dean was back in his own body and hissing _sotto voce_ curses as he lost his grip on the brickwork of the wall and landed with a painful thump. 

_Round up your people,_ Hawkeye told him, _if you want to catch them coming out._

_Teach your grandma!_ Dean retorted scornfully.

He barely reached the street corner before Ellison slipped out of a doorway. 

"They're moving?" he asked tersely.

"Yeah, and there's a whole lot more happening in that yard than we banked on," Dean replied.  "Jim, he must have someone on the city gates bribed if he's hoping to get _this_ kind of crap out unchallenged."

Ellison rarely swore, but even in the chancy light Dean could tell he was thinking about it.

_Don't sweat it,_ Hawkeye said unexpectedly.  _The city gates are covered.  Let a few of them get away, so we can catch whoever's planning to let 'em out of the city.  You worry about getting the guy in charge!_

And he was gone again, leaving Dean to try to think of a way to relay this to Ellison without raising awkward questions about how he knew it.  Except that when he turned to him, Ellison was eyeing him with considerable exasperation.

"Don't bother, I heard!"

"What – "

"Later, Winchester, we've got an asshole to catch, remember?"

 

xXx

 

And in the event, it all went unexpectedly smoothly.  Crowley wasn't stupid; he sent his people out in a small, slow trickle that was less likely to be noticed and remarked upon, but that just played straight into the Watch's hands.  They let the first cart and a couple of individual ponies with handlers go over the course of nearly an hour, sending a well-hidden follower after each to keep track of them.  Then, just before the third hour past midnight, the Watch's covered lanterns were uncovered and they converged on Crowley's yard, raising the traditional hue-and-cry.

Predictably, some of the people within the compound tried to bolt and were nabbed jumping out of windows and roof accesses.  One of Ellison's junior constables even caught someone popping up out of a sewer grate halfway down the street.  The majority, however, were trapped inside the yard at the back of the compound and it took no effort at all to secure them.

Crowley wasn't one of the ones trying to run.  That didn't surprise Dean any more than the man's casual attempt to pretend nothing fishy was going on.

"Is there something I can help you with, Captain?" he asked Ellison coolly, ignoring Dean entirely.

Which suited Dean just fine.  While Ellison was dealing with the boss of the operation, he could flip the tarpaulin covers off some of the most jittery ponies he'd ever encountered, to reveal – surprise! – black and white stripes.  The very small ponies were more phlegmatic, even rather cute, but Dean remembered Hawkeye's remarks about Barzek's family – _small people, small horses –_ and was not surprised that some of the people they arrested were also dwarfs, including the man who had tried to escape through the sewer.  He wondered what Hawkeye would make of that and suspected it wouldn't make him happy.

Dean turned his attention to the two carts left in the yard, both of them stacked high with coffins.  In the background he could hear Crowley putting on a very good show of annoyance and outrage, demanding to know what crime he was committing in shipping coffins out of his lawful business premises.

Jody, Megan and Jo appeared next to Dean, and the four of them exchanged looks.

"We expecting the lawful dead in those boxes?" Jody asked, typically laid-back.

"I don't know," Dean said slowly.  "I mean ... it wasn't just striped pony meat that kept turning up for sale, right?"

"So ... are we expecting big-ass snakes?" Megan asked.

"You read my mind."

"Awesome," Jody said, and she sighed.  "Fine.  I vote we tip the lids off and stand well back."

"Pretty sound," Megan judged.  "Still – be even better if we tip the lids off with something that has a long handle.  And then stand well back."

"I know just the thing," Jo said, and she darted away inside the workshop.  When she returned she was carrying a long wooden pole with a hook on the end of it.  "I saw it in the embalming room," she explained.  "I think they use it to open those high up ventilation windows."  She handed it to Dean, and widened her eyes innocently at the look he gave her.  "What?  I'm just the rookie, Cap'n."

"And we're right behind you, Cap'n," Jody added, smirking when he glared at her and Megan.

"So many goddamn smartasses," he grumbled.

Pole or no pole, he didn't want to get too close to those coffins.  He didn't believe for a moment that they were empty, and he didn't believe that the contents were anything legitimate.  But evidence was evidence, and while the urge was strong to order someone junior to do the job, Dean didn't really believe in asking his crew to do anything he wasn't prepared to do himself.

Still.  A little caution was merited.

He rapped on the side of the nearest, uppermost coffin with the pole first and paused, listening.  There was a lot of background noise in Crowley's yard, but he didn't think he could hear anything moving inside the box. 

"What if the lid's nailed down?" Megan said to Jody.

"If it is, somebody better find me a crowbar," Dean said shortly, and he gave the lid a rough shove with the pole.  Sure enough, it didn't move.  "Of course.  Fine.  Crowbar, someone?"  He handed the pole to Jody, and hopped up into the cart.

One of Ellison's constables appeared with a crowbar that he passed to Dean.  With a good deal of misgiving, Dean applied it to the lid of the coffin and set about prying it off.  There was still no noise or sign of movement, but once the lid was loose on all sides, Dean backed up as much as he could in the confines of the cart and used the pole to lever it up so he could squint inside.

"What have you got?" Jody demanded.

"I think we're gonna need that beast healer – Welles," Dean said.  He pulled the lid aside and studied the contents for a moment before giving them a cautious poke with the pole.  No movement.  "It's another monkey, a big one.  I think it's dead."

"A monkey?"

"Yeah.  Round up some pairs of hands, will you?  We need to get this box out of here so I can open the others.  Something stinks in this cart, and it's not coming from this critter."

Two of Dean's constables, Abel and Lu, removed the first coffin, and Dean set about prying the lid off the next one.  Meanwhile, Jody and Megan had found themselves some tools and were busy in the second cart.

The next coffin was full of heavy hemp sacks that were tied at the necks and moved sluggishly in response to the chilly night air.  Dean prodded them – and jumped back when one jerked and hissed.  He slapped the lid back on the coffin quickly.  "I found the snakes," he announced to Jo, conscious that every hair on his body felt like it was standing on end.  "Don't think any of 'em are as big as the one they found pieces of, but they're still pretty big."

Her eyes were huge.  "Are they loose?"

"Nope – they're in bags.  Should be safe, so long as no one decides to take a closer look."

Lu and Abel were not happy about this, bags or no bags, but they were careful with the coffin as they lifted it down – grunting a little under the unexpected weight – and quick to put it to one side, where Megan directed one of Penny Street's rookies to stand guard over it until Cassie Welles arrived.

The smell of the third coffin did not make Dean want to open it.  He paused for a second, watching Jody pick over the contents of the coffin she had just opened. 

"What you got?"

"Jars," she reported.  "Sealed pottery jars.  Pretty heavy."  She lifted one out; the neck and stopper were covered with a piece of sack-cloth that was tied on with hemp twine, and there was a wooden label hanging from it.  "Label's got some kind of symbol inked on it, nothing I recognise."  She cut the twine, removed the cover, and used her belt-knife to break the wax seal on the stopper.  And almost at once she jerked her head back, her face screwing up.

"Jody?"

"Sorry – weird smell," she said.

"Weird how?" Dean demanded.

"Salty, acrid – some kind of preservative, maybe?"  Crowley used a range of preservatives to embalm the dead, but Dean doubted this instance was a genuine funerary process.  "Whatever's in here is packed tight and doesn't seem to be, um, wet."

"Stopper it, and leave the rest," Dean told her.  "Someone else can find out what's in 'em.  Keep checking the coffins."

"Aye, Cap'n."

He turned his attention, reluctantly, to the third coffin in his cart.  Jo was hanging over the side of the cart, watching with interest as he began to lever the lid off; for that reason alone Dean made sure that when he opened it, it was on the side facing away from her.  The smell was getting progressively more unpleasant, a thick, sour, salty, rancid smell that boded nothing good.

Jo was suddenly standing next to Dean, having climbed into the cart when he wasn't looking.  "What's in there?" she demanded.  "Wow, that really stinks."

Dean shoved the coffin lid down.  "Go help Jody," he ordered her.

Jo set her chin stubbornly.  "You gave me the talk on my first day," she told him.  "I know I'm gonna see bad stuff."

"Yeah, well call me weird, Jo, but I think you've got a right to another six months before you have to deal with shit like this."  Dean spotted Sergeant Murgo a few yards away.  "Murgo! Gimme a hand here."

"I can handle this!  Why do you keep treating me like a kid?"

_Because you are a kid_ , Dean wanted to say.  It wasn't true – she was older than his brother Sam, though not by much – but even had he not known what her mother would say, Dean didn't want her to have to deal with _this_.  He didn't want to deal with it himself; no one was ever really ready for some of the foulness they dealt with in the Watch.  He wanted Jo to continue enjoying being a constable for a little longer, rather than bracing herself for every new shift. 

"Come on, Rookie," Murgo said, from the foot of the cart.  "You got your orders – do you want me tellin' your momma you're on report for sassing the Captain again?"

Jo all but threw herself out of the cart in her temper, but Dean trusted Jody to set her straight.  And he could cope with both her and potentially Ellen being furious with him if it meant she didn't have to see whatever was in that coffin.  He wished he had a similar escape route.

"Rookie's right," Murgo said.  "This thing stinks."

"People on the north border know it stinks," Dean said, trying to breathe through his mouth.  "You gonna think less of me if I hurl?"

"I won't tell if you don't, Cap'n."

"Good enough."  Dean pulled the lid off.

The stench promptly developed tenfold.  There was nothing immediately identifiable in the coffin; it was packed with a variety of shapes wrapped in stained sacking, but in the light from Murgo's lantern Dean could see that something was oozing noxiously from the objects into the bottom of the coffin, which had a thick layer of woodshavings, presumably to soak it up and prevent it leaking out of the joins.  That at least was the only normal feature of the business, woodshavings and sawdust being common measures used to prevent any awkwardly timed leaks from the deceased.

Dean didn't want to examine those lumps of sackcloth.  Nevertheless, using the hooked end of his crowbar he gingerly pulled the edge of one bit of sacking back, and bile flooded his mouth.

_"Motherfucker,"_ Murgo said, quietly and venomously.

A very dead eye was staring back at them, partially obscured by sticky wisps of hair.

Dean had to turn away for a moment.  He spat over the side of the cart and took a minute to get his stomach under control.  Then he turned back and with a ruthlessness he didn't really feel, he used the crowbar to turn over a couple more of the packages.  Most of them were better wrapped, but the split part of the crowbar's hook end caught on one and dragged the object out to dangle gruesomely in the air, half in and half out of its wrappings.

It was a hand, blackened and a little shrivelled-looking, as though someone had attempted unsuccessfully to tan it like leather.

Murgo was an old-fashioned man.  "We're gonna need a priest here," he croaked, staring. 

"Will I do?"

Dean looked up, startled, and saw Castiel standing beside the cart, and there were a number of other people with him; a couple of Heralds, several Guardsmen and women, and two women in Healer Green.  He hadn't even heard them arrive.

He wanted to answer Castiel, who was watching him worriedly, but he didn't have any words.  What he did have was anger boiling up from somewhere inside him.

Still carrying the hand dangling from the crowbar, Dean clambered down from the cart and stalked across the compound to where Ellison was arguing with Crowley.  They both shut up when he approached them, the severed hand held out on the end of the crowbar like a very macabre Nightwatchman's lantern.

It took Dean a couple of attempts to get his voice to work.

"You wanna explain this to me?" he asked Crowley eventually, and at the back of his mind he was a little appalled at the harsh, grating way the words came out.

He didn't know what he expected the man to say, but Crowley would never be anyone but Crowley.  He smiled mockingly at Dean.

"Well, you know how it is, Captain.  I find people are always offering to lend me a hand."

Dean's vision seemed to go hazy for a second.  The next thing he knew, Ellison was standing between him and Crowley, and he was gripping Dean's wrist – the one holding the crowbar – tightly. 

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he was saying.  "Easy, Winchester."  He raised his voice sharply.  "Will someone hogtie that asshole and get him out of my sight?"

"Anyone laying a finger on me will regret it!" Crowley said, and from the high, panicked note in his voice Dean realised he must have done something to actually frighten the man.

"Not as much as you'll regret it if you don't shut up and come with us quietly," a brusque female voice replied.

Dean felt he ought to know that voice, but his brain was still misfiring somewhat.  He couldn't seem to look away from Ellison's captain's bars.

"You can let me have the crowbar now," Ellison said in a conversational tone.

"Sure."  But Dean couldn't unwrap his fingers from it.

"I'm guessing this is just a tiny sample of what's in that coffin," Ellison said.

"Pretty much."

"I think the Heralds and the Guard are going to take over here, so we can stop opening boxes."

"Great.  That's ... great."  Dean managed to drag some semblance of control about himself.  "I'm gonna let you have the crowbar now."

"When you're ready," Ellison agreed.

"And then I'm gonna find someplace to throw up."

"Sounds like a plan."


	4. Chapter 4

Dean never had nightmares about anything but fire; something he hadn't thought to be grateful for until he saw the contents of those coffins laid out on stone tables in one of the teaching mortuaries at the Healers Collegium.  It was the only mortuary in Haven that was big enough.

The contraband seized in the raid on Crowley's premises was very mixed.  There were the live animals – zeebru, miniature ponies, snakes, and a variety of monkeys that had been drugged and packed into the sealed coffins for transportation – but there were also the dead body parts, some of which were human but some of which were not.  It had taken Healer Welles and Healer Scully some time to sort the latter out, and they still weren't sure what kind of animal a few pieces had come from. 

The jars Jody had discovered turned out to be packed with pickled or otherwise preserved internal organs, while one of the carts that had made it to the Guard post on Exiles Gate was full of crates of heavily processed material that Scully was ready to testify were 'medicines' made out of body parts, although they would probably never know if the bodies in question had been human or not.  Lady Kali was consulted about the odd symbols on the wooden labels attached to the various containers, and from them was able to identify both the alleged contents (some of the organs were definitely not what the labels said they were) and their supposed uses.  Most of them, she said, were intended for folk remedies and mystic rituals; the line between the two was almost nonexistent in some communities.

The presence of human body parts allowed the Heralds to question Crowley under Truth Spell.  Dean had seen it done before, of course, but this time he learned something new; that Truth Spell was both exhausting and, eventually, physically painful for the Herald who carried it out.  Most subjects were only put under the Spell for a minute or so, to establish the truth in a very narrow set of circumstances.  Crowley's business required a lot more questions to be asked, and he actively resisted answering, which led to half a dozen sessions of questioning by Herald Maria, who was the Seneschal's Herald, and Herald Asrel, the Herald Justice for the Strangers Quarter and lower city.

"It appears he was dealing in human organs for some time, but on a lesser scale," Herald Kolsen told Dean and Ellison later.  "The circus animals offered opportunities to expand his reach into a different area, and I'm sure I don't need to tell either of you that Crowley is quite the opportunist.  The problem was that many of the animals were difficult to care for, especially in our climate, and the people who came with them were not as easy to absorb into the local population as he had expected.  The buyer he hoped to offload some of the more exotic animals onto changed his mind at the last minute – "

"Have they been arrested?" Dean interrupted.

"He's claiming he backed out when he found the animals were illegally smuggled," Kolsen said, and he smiled wryly at Dean's disgusted snort.  "We don't believe he knew anything about the body snatching side of things, so we don't have grounds to Truth Spell him.  But don't worry, we won't forget him.  He'll trip up one day – his sort always do."

"What about the man Barzek?" Ellison asked.

"According to Crowley, Barzek was a trouble-maker.  According to the members of Barzek's family we arrested, Barzek wasn't happy with the way they were treated and he wasn't afraid to confront Crowley about it.  That led to an incident where Barzek was shut in a pen with the zeebru.  Something agitated them – "

"Wouldn't have taken much," Dean said, thinking of how nervy they had seemed.

"Exactly.  Barzek got kicked and he died a few hours later."  Kolsen grimaced.  "The mistreatment of his body was done deliberately, to intimidate his kindred.  Something similar seems to have happened to the man whose head and hand you found.  And just to add to the web of unpleasantness, Lady Kali's information was good – there's an underground trade in human body parts.  Most of them are being shipped outkingdom, but she pinpointed a couple of groups in the Strangers Quarter that we'll have to deal with as well."

"And the dead ape dumped on Mama Tulip?" Ellison said.

"That seems to have been personal," Kolsen said.

"Yeah, I kinda got that impression," Dean said dryly.  "Have either of them said why?"

"Crowley will only say that he wanted to teach her a lesson, and as the body wasn't human we can't justify Truth Spelling him over that incident.  But Mama Tulip says she withdrew her services from him some time ago on account of his uncivilised behaviour, and he reacted – in her words – "petulantly"."

Based on what he now knew about Mama Tulip, Dean was willing to bet that Crowley had actually tried to trade on her connection to the Queen's mother somehow.  But –

_But you're going to keep that idea to yourself, I hope,_ Kolsen said mildly.

_Sure.  What's a grunt like me gonna do about it anyway?_

_I'm not about to underestimate what you could do, Dean, but please accept this as a genuine expression of concern for your future welfare, and stay well away from anything that involves the Dowager Princess._

Dean blinked.  _Uh, what are the chances of me ever running into her?  Or anyone in the royal family?_

_I thought the same thing when I was your age._

The unexpected bitterness in Kolsen's mental voice was like a punch to Dean's gut, so he was grateful when Ellison turned the conversation to how the Guards on the city gate had been drawn into Crowley's machinations.

 

xXx

 

Barzek's burial was held a week after Crowley's operation was shut down.  As Dean had promised Hawkeye, the mendicant Father Joe spoke the prayers for him in the Lady's Cemetery (better known to locals as the Paupers' Boneyard, but none the less cared for and respected for that), assisted by Castiel who had insisted on attending.

And Barzek got a better turnout than Dean had previously anticipated, for his family members – the five dwarfs from the circus – had been released by the Guard the day before.  They were deemed by the Herald's Court to be hapless victims of Crowley and no charges were brought against them.

Hawkeye was accompanied to the cemetery by a red-headed woman dressed in the sober gown, apron and coif of a Palace servant.  When the prayers had been said, much to Dean's surprise he stepped forward and sang in an unfamiliar language, something that was probably a hymn or psalm judging by the way Barzek's family all murmured a ritual phrase when he was done.  Hawkeye had a clear tenor voice, and it was as good a send off as anyone could ask for.  Afterwards he paid the two gravediggers, gave generous alms to Father Joe in thanks for his services, and spoke briefly to Barzek's kindred before they quietly left the cemetery.

"Where will they go?" Dean asked him.

"They've got passage with a trader heading for Rethwellan," Hawkeye replied.  "I don't think they ever wanted to come here anyway."

"They gonna be all right when they get there?"

Hawkeye gave him a crooked smile.  "Don't worry about that.  They've got a lot of skills, they'll find work.  And they're taking their ponies with 'em."

"Good."  And Dean was genuinely glad for them.  Crowley had treated them pretty badly; they didn't deserve to suffer for the situation he'd dropped them in.  "Say, Kolsen didn't tell me what you guys did with the rest of the critters."

This drew a soft huff of a laugh from the woman, the first sound she'd uttered since she arrived, and Hawkeye's smile broadened into a genuine grin.

"We handed 'em all over to the Temple of Thenoth."

"Whoa!  That Order's practically on its knees already, man – how they gonna manage with all them zeebru and monkeys?"  Dean demanded.

"It won't be a problem," Hawkeye assured him.  "A couple of collectors at Court have already offered to take most of the animals for their menageries, and they'll be allowed to – subject to a suitably generous donation."

Dean relaxed.  "That's all right then."

"Relax will you, Grandma?  The whole world ain't yours to fret over."

"I've told him this before," Castiel said dryly.

"'Scuse _me_ for caring," Dean grumbled.

"We should get back to the Palace," the woman said softly to Hawkeye.  She had a trace of an accent Dean couldn't place.

"Yeah, I guess so."  Hawkeye offered his hand to Dean, who clasped it.  "Thanks, Winchester."

"No problem."

Hawkeye glanced at Castiel, and added, "Next time you're at the Palace, bring your bows.  You can try out _my_ archery range."

"Sure," Dean said agreeably.

It wasn't going to happen, but it was a nice offer all the same.

"When are you due back on duty?" Castiel asked, as he walked back to the city gate with Dean.

"Pretty soon," Dean admitted.  "I've got a little time though.  Enough to give my buddy Eslan a nice, ripe pear before he goes."

Castiel eyed him.  "What about me?  Do I not get a pear?"

"I dunno – do you deserve a pear?"

"I deserve all of the pears," Castiel told him.

"I guess you can share mine then."

Dean bought the pears from a seller he'd spotted on his way to the cemetery earlier; they were winter stores, it being far too early in the year for them to be new, but they'd been stored well and were firm and sweet.  They bought tea and fruit buns from another stall, and found a seat in the sun just outside the city wall.  Eslan cantered up to claim his pear from Dean, and the two men leaned against each other just a little as they ate.  For the time being, at least, all was well with the world.

But Dean, with his busy brain, had a question he wanted to ask, even though he knew there was really no good answer to it.

"I gotta know," he said reluctantly.  "Is this how things are gonna be from now on?"

Castiel frowned.  "What do you mean?"

"I mean ... do we see each other for a few hours every couple of weeks, and the rest of the time carry on like we never met?"

Castiel was silent for a long time.  Finally, he said, "I don't know.  I'm sorry, Dean, I don't know what the future holds any better than you do."

Dean wished then that he hadn't asked. 

"A few hours is better than nothing," he said, and he changed the subject.

 

xXx

 

Ellison was sitting in the taproom at the Roadhouse Inn that evening when Dean returned from his shift.  This wasn't exactly unexpected; given everything that had happened over the past few weeks, Dean had wondered when his former mentor would turn up.  This was not a conversation he wanted to have in Ellen's bar, however, with all the perennially interested listeners it held.

"You eaten?" he asked Ellison by way of a greeting.

"I thought I'd wait for you," Ellison said easily.

"Right."  Dean flagged down Tamar.  "Two plates of bread and cold mutton, and a pitcher of beer, sweetheart.  Stick it on my slate."

"I'm not your sweetheart," Tamar told him, but she called his order into the kitchen and pulled the pitcher herself.

"Come on upstairs," Dean told Ellison, and he led the way up to his rooms.

His cat, Baby, was washing her whiskers in the window seat.  She paused for a moment when the two of them walked in, then pointedly turned her back on them and moved on to washing the rest of herself.  Dean lit the candle lantern hanging above his small table and set the pitcher and beer mugs down.

"Where do you want to start?" he asked, gesturing for Ellison to take the seat opposite him.

"When were you going to tell me you're a MindSpeaker?" Ellison asked.

"I wasn't," Dean said flatly.  At the other man's raised eyebrow, he elaborated.  "It was one of the first things the Heralds told me not to do – tell anyone.  Too risky if anyone else found out.  You know how folk would get if they thought I was reading their minds."

" _Are_ you?"

"Nope.  That was another thing they hammered me with.  Gotta respect people's privacy, nothing I overhear can be used as evidence ..."  Dean's voice trailed off.  Ellison was giving him a very piercing look.  "I'm _not,_ " he insisted.  Then he amended that.  "I catch things now and again.  I can shield it all out, but if I do I have to live with a permanent sick headache.  So I mostly shield it out but some stuff filters through.  It's annoying more than anything.  You ever wondered what your constables think of you?  Well, wonder no more.  I can categorically tell you that you don't want to know."  He leaned back in his chair.  "But you know all this, don't you, Jim?  You're a MindSpeaker too."

"I'm not," Ellison said calmly.  He folded a piece of mutton in a slice of bread and took a bite out of it.

"You heard Hawkeye that night," Dean said, staring. 

"I did.  I heard you too."

"But you're not a MindSpeaker."

"MindSpeakers can send _and_ receive.  I only receive."

"Huh," was the only thing Dean could think to say.

"The woman who taught me to shield said they might as well call me a MindListener," Ellison elaborated.  "You gonna pour that beer?  – Apparently there are people who can send but not receive.  I'm glad it's the other way around for me, because I can't see what use shouting into the void without ever getting an answer would be."

Dean conceded that this was a good point.

"Frankly, it was more use to me when I was in the Guard," Ellison continued.  "It does have some uses now, of course, but – nothing I can rely on officially.  Still, it's always good to know when there are MindSpeakers around."  He raised an eyebrow at Dean.

"You knew I was one all along?" Dean asked.  He was curious rather than annoyed.  He still found it hard to believe that he'd been a MindSpeaker all his life without knowing.

"Hm."  Ellison made a face and waggled his hand in the air.  "Not like you are now.  There was definitely something there, but I wasn't picking up whole sentences or even words most of the time.  And it wasn't constant.  I certainly wasn't expecting you to suddenly be holding conversations with people, so what changed?"

"I hit my head," Dean said, but that wasn't true and the look Ellison gave him said he wasn't buying it.  "What?  People _do_ develop it after hitting their heads."  Or so the Heralds had told him.

"I know you, Dean.  What really happened?"

If it had been anyone else asking – Sam, Ellen, Bobby Singer – Dean would have flatly refused to say anything.  But Jim Ellison ...  Dean would never articulate it quite so baldly even in the privacy of his own head, but Ellison had always hit the spots inside him that that been left empty by Jon Winchester's rejection of him.  He'd been a very peripheral presence in Dean's life until relatively recently, but even the fleeting contacts Dean had with him had always been a good deal more positive than those with his own father.  He was calm, fair and remarkably unjudgemental.  It was doubtful that Dean could tell him anything that would shock or even surprise him very much.

"I met a guy called Castiel."

Sure enough, Ellison only nodded and waited patiently to hear the rest.

"And ... somewhere along the line, this stuff in my head woke up."  Dean hesitated, but Ellison was still regarding him calmly and acceptingly.  "You know what happened with Sam and Adam a few weeks ago?"

"I know there's a lot more to it than the official story," Ellison acknowledged, "but I'm not asking and I don't expect you to tell me.  Although I hope you'd trust me enough to tell me if it became necessary for me to know."

"Yeah, well maybe someday I'll tell you anyway," Dean said, looking away for him for a moment.  "Probably when I'm less freaked out by it, if I'm honest."

"Fair enough."

"But they didn't keep me at the Palace for a week because of that.  They kept me because the stuff inside my head was pretty much waking the dead, and I needed to learn how to keep it locked up."

"You must have picked it up pretty quickly," Ellison observed.

"I guess.  I mean, Kolsen's been checking up on me, but apart from the headaches ... and even those mostly went away after Cas came back."  Dean drew in an unsteady breath and shot a look at Ellison.  "Do you believe in lifebonds?"

"Yes," Ellison said, so promptly that Dean blinked.

"Wow ... all right.  I was not expecting that." 

"And before you ask, I'm not lifebonded to Sandburg."

That surprised him into a snort of laughter.  " _Damn,_ Jim ...!"

Ellison smirked at him.  "You wouldn't be the first person to ask."

"Well, there's gotta be _some_ explanation for him."

"And I still haven't had enough beer for that."

"Fair play," Dean agreed, but he relaxed a little.  "Cas seems to think we're lifebonded."

Ellison's steady gaze didn't waver.  "Do you?"

Dean thought about that.  He _did_ believe it, but explaining why was more difficult.  It wasn't like  there was a visible sign of it, like a mark on his skin, after all.

"Let's put it this way," he said slowly.  "Not too long from now, this guy is gonna be putting on that white uniform and heading off on circuit for a year or more at a time.  I hardly see him _now_ , and we live in the same city.  Which is crazy.  If it was anyone else, I wouldn't have to think about it – I'd be telling him it's been nice, but let's not bother again.  Because what would be the point?"

"What _is_ the point?" Ellison asked him.

"Hell if I know."  Dean took a heavy swig of his beer.  "Anyone ever tries to tell you it's romantic, though, you can tell 'em from me that it's bullshit."

"Then what is it?"

Dean rubbed his face tiredly.  "I don't know," he admitted, and he could hear the helpless note in his voice.  "I just don't know, Jim."

 

xXx

 

The day was warm, even for mid-spring, and full of promise for what looked increasingly likely to be an uncomfortably hot summer.  The sky was blue, the birds were singing and tweeting ... and the air was full of whoops and cheers.  Castiel settled himself more comfortably on the broad wooden seat and propped his back against the wall that enclosed the Collegium archery range.

He didn't think Dean had actually forgotten he was there, but for the moment he was wrapped up in having entirely too much fun with deadly weapons to realise that Castiel was no longer participating.  Not that Castiel minded.  He was deriving a great deal of entertainment from watching.

Today was Dean's regular monthly rest-day, and that morning he had made his usual pilgrimage to the Palace complex to visit his brothers.  But for one circumstance he might not have bothered; lately Sam and Adam had been making more attempts to visit him instead.  Castiel had conveyed an invitation from Hawkeye, however, and on his own advice it had been fairly firmly worded: _Weather's gonna be good for a week, so you've got no excuse.  Bring your bows and your best game._

("He's not gonna come unless I make an issue of it, is he?" Hawkeye said. 

"He probably thinks you were being polite," Castiel agreed. 

"Yeah – he'll learn.  So I need to be rude?" 

"No, just act as if it never occurred to you that he wouldn't come.  I'll do the rest." 

Which had earned him a snort and an eyeroll.)

Dean had grumbled about a lack of practice time and how busy he was, but he'd arrived at the Palace complex carrying his bowcase.  He had lunch with his brothers, then met up with Castiel who escorted him to the range.

Had there been a lot of people around, Castiel thought Dean might still have made an excuse to leave.  For whatever reason – and Castiel didn't pretend to understand why this was – the Palace complex seemed to make him deeply uneasy.  But Hawkeye, possibly understanding Dean's reticence a little better, had arranged for this part of the range to be empty and greeted him with such casual friendliness that Dean relaxed and showed the other man his bows.

"They're pretty old," he said, explaining the names and who had made them.

"Your _grandmother?_ " Hawkeye said, whistling his appreciation as he looked over the bow Dean called Magpie.  "Damn.  If she ever wants a job ...  Who fletched your arrows?"

"I did," Dean said, a little indignantly, and Hawkeye grinned.

"Think you could still do it?"

"Sure, if you don't mind the first dozen being unusable."

"So you've got Bone-Eye and Magpie – what's the third one called?"

Dean went quiet for a moment.  "Yeah, I don't – that one I don't use.  That's Frithra."

"Frithra?"  Hawkeye looked at Castiel, who had translated the names of the other two.

"Actually, I'm not sure ... Dean's people speak a different dialect to mine."  Castiel looked at Dean questioningly.  "Frith is an old name for the sun, I think, so – Sunlight?"

"Sunlord," Dean said, subdued.  "That was my mom's bow.  I string it, but I don't use it."

"Sycamore?"  Hawkeye asked, not pushing the matter.

"Yeah.  She made it herself."

"She knew what she was doing."  He left it at that and didn't argue when Dean unstrung Frithra and put it back in the case.  "So – ready to show me what you got?"

"This is gonna be a shitshow," Dean grumbled, but he stripped off his jerkin and outer shirt, and picked up Bone-Eye.  "Get ready to be unimpressed."

"Yeah, yeah, quit trying to put it off."

"Asshole."

"Aw, sweetie-pie, you say the most adorable things ..."

At which point, Castiel began to let himself fade into the background.  He was far more interested in watching in any case.  And admittedly Dean's first handful of shots were nothing to write home about, but as he slowly warmed into the exercise, he lost some of his nerves ... and the pattern changed.

Castiel watched with fascination as Dean, who usually gave the appearance of being ten years older than he actually was, shed all of those assumed years and more to become the teenager he had never had an opportunity to be when he was younger.  It was a revelation to see him light up with the sheer pleasure of being good at something and to have someone acknowledge that. 

They didn't stop at archery.  Hawkeye produced first a selection of throwing spears that Dean surprised himself by remembering how use, then slings and something called a bolas, followed by throwing knives – Castiel briefly got dragged back in to display his own prowess with those, although he backed out again, half-laughing, when Hawkeye tried to get him throwing hand axes of all things – and then, rather alarmingly, they moved on to throwing machetes.  That Hawkeye was proficient in all of these, and probably more, was no surprise.  That _Dean_ turned out to be, was.

Almost as interesting was how Hawkeye managed Dean, which shouldn't have seemed odd – he was the Heralds' archery instructor after all, and had the reputation of being the best archer in the kingdom – but as time went on Castiel couldn't shake the impression that for all this was presented to Dean as a fun afternoon playing with projectile weapons, it was actually a test of some kind.  He was sure of it when Hawkeye eventually doubled back to a selection of recurve bows that they hadn't tried earlier, and gently needled Dean – who was sweating quite a bit by this time – into trying his hand at them.  That was an old training technique, to wear the subject out and then switch weapons to see how their aim held up when they were tired.

"He's a natural," a quiet voice said, and Castiel turned his head to see Kolsen sitting on the bench next to him.  It was anyone's guess when he had arrived; he was the most unobtrusive man Castiel had ever met.  Kolsen smiled slightly, adding, "He must be, to manage this with as little practice as he has time for."

"Yes he is."  After a moment, he added, "I expected him to be capable, but I didn't expect _this_."

"He's full of unexpected abilities."  Kolsen sighed.  "And now I'm sure I'm going to be rehashing an old argument with Hawkeye.  I suspected as much when he told me he'd invited Dean to come and play at bows and arrows with him – his words, not mine, by the way."

"Bows and arrows!"  Castiel huffed a laugh.  The phrasing was certainly apt; having satisfied himself of Dean's abilities to the point where Dean was probably going to regret it in the morning, Hawkeye was now enjoying himself showing off his trick shooting to what was admittedly a very appreciative audience.  Dean wasn't the only one who'd somewhat regressed to his boyhood over the course of the afternoon.

"I hope you don't mind them getting along so well."

Castiel gave Kolsen a curious look.  "Why would I?"

Kolsen eyed him knowingly.  "I'm not unaware of your relationship with Dean."

"We have a lifebond," Castiel said.  "And for that reason, I'm glad Dean gets along so well with Hawkeye – I _encourage_ it.  He needs more friends, especially people he doesn't have some other, more pressured connection with."

"Ah."

"I'm worried about what effect it will have when I get my Whites and go out on circuit," he admitted.  "He's started worrying about it too, although I'm not sure if he's just picking up on that from me."

"I doubt it," Kolsen said.  "We made a point of keeping a close eye on him when he returned to the lower city after the ... incident.  He was restless and unsettled, and struggling with his MindSpeech for weeks.  Until you came back from the border, and suddenly he relaxed again."  He sighed.  "That's unfortunate.  We can't afford not to send you out on circuit, Castiel, we never have enough active Heralds as it is."

"I don't expect you not to use me to best effect, and neither does Dean.  What I hope is that he'll have people around him to fill in the gaps when I'm not here."

"He has two brothers."

"Both of whom have their own lives and interests elsewhere.  And he has friends in the lower city, but almost all of them involve other relationships that limit how close he can be to them.  He needs friends who are _just_ friends – equals."

"Fair comment," Kolsen acknowledged. 

"Dean expects people to abandon him," Castiel said.  "I don't pretend to know more than a tiny portion of his history, but there seems to be a trend of people important to him either rejecting him or being taken from him in some way."  He paused.  "He accepts that I will also leave him, one way or another."

"Despite appearances, his self-esteem is poor." Kolsen sighed.  "I have noticed.  I doubt the former District Commander in the lower city could have convinced any of the other captains that they were fired so easily.  Every last one of them would have been on Central Command's doorstep within the hour.  Not Dean – he was waiting for it to happen.  The irony being that he would have created a far greater fuss if someone tried to remove any of his constables from duty without due cause."

"I count that a virtue in him," Castiel said sharply.

"So do I.  But there are some dangerously ambitious individuals in the Watch hierarchy who have probably already noticed that he has pressure points that can be exploited."  Kolsen grimaced.  "I keep pushing for the Watch to be overhauled, but it won't happen any day soon.  But for what it's worth, I shan't be taking my eye off Dean."

"I appreciate that."

Kolsen shrugged.  "He's a valuable individual.  He's young, smart, energetic, and dedicated – men and women of his type are vitally important to the future success of Valdemar.  And I like him.  For all his personal issues, he keeps his sense of humour and tries to do his best.  Really, with his background it wouldn't have taken much for him to turn into a criminal, but he remains fundamentally honest and decent.  There's a lot to respect in that."

Castiel eyed him curiously.  "Do you regret that he wasn't Chosen?"

"Eh.  Not particularly.  Would he make a good Herald?  Certainly.  But equally he'd make a good officer in the Guard, and he certainly makes a good Watch Captain.  These things work out the way they're meant to."

Kolsen might have said more but at that point Dean and Hawkeye approached, having packed up for the day.

"... promised a couple of Bardic trainees I'd take them through some basic hand-to-hand in a candlemark," Hawkeye was saying.  "Hey, if you wanna hang around, you can impress 'em with that _thing_ the Watch carry around and seem to think they could hold a siege with."

The needling tone of this made Kolsen sigh, but Dean merely raised an eyebrow and pulled his Bully out of the pocket in his trousers.  "What – _this_ thing?" he said. 

He tossed it at Hawkeye, who fielded it easily but huffed at the unexpected weight.  The Watch truncheon – known colloquially as 'the Beak's Bully' - was a little short of two feet long, made of hardened ironwood with a head and multiple bands made of iron.

"Damn, son!  Why aren't you walking with a limp?"

"I do when I'm not carrying it!" 

Hawkeye sniggered.  "Still don't believe you could take on a swordsman with this."

Dean snorted.  "Swordsman – probably not.  Drunk asshole kid with a sword, that I can do."

"Don't sell yourself short," Kolsen told him with a smile.  "There's a reason Lord Simenon fights left-handed.  He fell foul of the Watch when he was young and stupid, and made the mistake of pulling his sword on them.  The Healers couldn't completely fix the nerve damage in his right elbow afterwards."

"And what happened to the constable who busted him up?" Dean asked dryly.

"She's captain of the Black Kilns Watch now," Kolsen said, amused.

"Huh!"  Dean made a face at Hawkeye.  "Don't sass _her_ in a dark alley, buddy."

"Izzy Hartley?  She's a laugh.  She'll bust your balls too, of course, but – "

"But we don't put ourselves in that position, do we?" Kolsen interjected mildly.  Hawkeye grinned.

"I should probably be getting back," Dean said, hefting his bowcase over his shoulder.

"There's time for you to clean up and have a meal with me," Castiel suggested.  "Eslan and I will see you back to the Roadhouse in good time."

Dean wavered.  "Yeah, that sounds good."  He offered Hawkeye his hand.  "Thanks, man, it's been a blast."

Hawkeye clasped his hand, but gave him a crooked smile.  "I'm expecting you back here next month, Winchester.  Someone's gotta push you to do better, and it ain't gonna be those assholes at Water Street."

Dean groaned, but Hawkeye waved him off.

 

xXx

 

When Dean and Castiel had left the range, Kolsen looked at Hawkeye.  "Well?" he asked, amused but a little wary.

"Well ... the armsmaster at Water Street Barracks wasn't wrong," Hawkeye said, very bland.

"He's good?"

"You're yanking my chain, right?  He's better than good.  He practices, _properly_ practices, once a tenday at their crappy little archery butts, if he gets the chance.  He uses bows that are second-hand and were probably great in their day, but they're twenty years old and strung with the cheapest strings on the market because that's all he can afford.  A quarter candlemark to warm up, and he was hitting the bull with almost every shot."

"He's accustomed to those bows," Kolsen said.

"He'd have to be," Hawkeye said flatly.  "I gave him a couple of mine to try and he was practically splitting arrows.  He's a natural, and not just with a bow.  Knives, axes, spears – put it in his hand and he'll put it in the black.  He's got a good eye for the shot and he's not scared to take it."  He paused.  "Makes you wonder what else he could do.  Doesn't it?"

Kolsen met his challenging stare.  "He's a captain in the Watch."

"Why?"  Hawkeye waited, but when Kolsen said nothing his exasperation began to show.  "Why is this guy in the Watch, Phil?  Why isn't he in the Guard?  Hell, why isn't he a Herald?"

"You know why he isn't a Herald," Kolsen said quietly.

"Fine, the Companions are just _that_ picky.  But why isn't he in the Guard?"

Kolsen sighed.  "He was, for a very brief period.  But he forged his father's signature to sign up when he was sixteen, and when he got found out he was dismissed.  By the time he was old enough to sign up in his own right, he'd already been grandfathered into the Watch by Captain Singer."

"And the Guard won't accept recruits from the Watch," Hawkeye said, disgusted.

"I know your feelings on that subject well enough, and I even agree to an extent.  But in fairness, most people who join the Watch do so because they've either just left the Guard for some reason, or they're not fit to serve.  Dean falls into the relatively small percentage who join for other reasons.  And we need him there."

"We need him in the Queen's Bowmen," Hawkeye countered.  "We need him on pretty much any of the borders, where we never have enough really good archers.  We need him – "

" - In the lower city, managing that festering stew-pot of humanity who are one step from becoming a raging mob on any given day of the week," Kolsen retorted sharply.  "Clint, you were actually there when he and Captain Ellison took down a major dealer in _human body parts_.  The Guard might be trying to claim credit now, but it took the diligence and efforts of the Watch to bring Crowley and his associates to justice."

"Yeah, and let's not forget that the Guard were ready to let that asshole ship his crap out of the city in the middle of the night," Hawkeye said snidely.

"Yes, well ... corruption in the City Guard isn't a new problem, unfortunately.  And I'm sure the former District Commander of the Watch gave Crowley plenty of reasons to believe that a few gold crowns in the right pockets would ensure any amount of blind eyes being turned.  That doesn't change the fact that Dean does good work, and as matters stand we need him to keep doing it.  So do me a favour, _please._   By all means be his friend and have fun teaching him trick shooting, but don't make suggestions to him about things you have no authority to follow through on."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"And I'm sure you do.  Assembling a team of people with specialist skills to respond to unusual threats is an interesting idea, and would probably be extremely useful, but as things stand it has less than no hope of being pushed through the Regency Council."  Kolsen rubbed the spot between his eyebrows, telling himself he wasn't going to develop a headache.  "Do I need to remind you just what a knife-edge the Heralds exist on at present?  We have two people on the Regency Council who have an active loathing of the Circle and would disband it in a heartbeat if they were able.  The only reason they've failed to acquire sufficient support from some of our more toxic nobles is because nothing will persuade them to work together towards a common goal."

"You're forgetting the part where they're _foreigners_ ," Hawkeye pointed out.

"That certainly doesn't help their case," Kolsen agreed, "but that wouldn't stop certain individuals from joining them if they thought it could be turned to their own advantage.  Fortunately they're both entirely too paranoid and suspicious of everyone around them, but the argument about the existence of the Heralds won't go away, and trying to institute a new group of armed specialists under the Lord Marshal's control will just convince everyone involved of their worst fears."

"If that's the worst of their fears, then they must be complete and utter morons," Hawkeye said curtly.  "We effectively have no monarch right now!  Don't they realise that every kingdom from here to Vaterlund is eyeing us up like we're hanging our asses out with a price-tag on 'em?  It's only a matter of time before one of 'em tries something."

"No, I had no idea," Kolsen said, exasperation getting the better of him.  "I'm only the Lord Marshal's Herald, after all.  What do I know about anything?"

The two of them glared at each other for a moment, then Hawkeye backed down.

"Sorry, sorry – I just – "

"You're frustrated, and I appreciate that," Kolsen said at once.  "For what it's worth, I agree with you – we need to take a more proactive approach towards the hostile agents that are almost certainly operating in-kingdom already.  But it is what it is, and we have to hope that the people we already have working on the problem are enough.  At least for the time being."

"Yeah," Hawkeye said tiredly.

"And now you have a lesson with your two Bards," Kolsen reminded him.  He tried to lighten the tone a little.  "Try not to scare them too much."

As he'd hoped, Hawkeye snorted.  "They should think themselves lucky!  One of 'em wanted to "give Natasha a try".  He's lucky I didn't arrange it for him."

Kolsen gave an exaggerated shudder.  "On second thoughts, give them a scare.  It's for their own safety, after all."

 

xXx

 

Castiel took Dean out of the palace precincts to a small bath house in the upper city when they left the archery range.  It was significantly more upscale than the baths in Beadweaver Street that Dean usually went to, and probably more expensive, but Castiel insisted on paying, just as he insisted on paying for the meal they had in the quiet little chop-house next door afterwards.

"There's always noise and fuss and the young ones coming and going at the Collegium," he commented, when Dean questioned the venue.  "Which is well enough, and I have no objection to them being young and noisy for the most part, but we would have no peace and quiet there."

"I guess the Strangers Quarter must have been kinda outside what you're used to," Dean said, amused.

"Not really."  Dean raised his eyebrows sceptically, and Castiel smiled.  "My Order was based in the busiest part of Throne City, so the noise and bustle day and night was nothing new when I came here.  Quiet is relative – people who talk about the quiet of the cloisters should really try living in a city monastery first!"

Dean chuckled.  "Fair enough."

"The difference at the Collegium is the age groups.  I'm easily twice the age of my classmates, and while they're all good-hearted younglings, there's a fair amount of horseplay when they're not in classes.  Normal for that age-group."  Castiel gestured to the quiet booth they sat in.  "There are benefits to being older and considered reliable – I don't need permission to come and go."

"I'll drink to that," Dean acknowledged, and he toasted Castiel with his mug of ale.

"I've been thinking," Castiel said, a little while later.

"Knew I could smell burning."

"You have a great future as a jester."

Dean snorted.

"We should test your range with MindSpeech."

Dean's smile faded to a frown.  "Why?"

"When I get my Whites, I'll be travelling circuits," Castiel said patiently.  "All the evidence suggests you're a strong MindSpeaker, Dean.  We might be able to keep in contact that way."

Dean stared at him.  "Cas, you could be posted anywhere.  Lake Evendim ... the Forest of Sorrows ..."

"Of course," he said patiently, "but I could also be posted a great deal closer.  Dean, _where_ I will be posted is not important at this point.  The question is – would you be interested in such a solution, were it possible?"

"Well, yeah, I guess, but – "

"Then we should test your range."  Castiel set about his meal as though everything was resolved.

Dean sighed.  "Cas ..."

"Eat your food."

"How do we even go about testing something like that?" Dean grumbled, picking up his knife.

Castiel rolled his eyes.  "Very simply.  We can start this evening, after I leave you at the Roadhouse – give me time to return to the Collegium, then try to MindSpeak me.  That would be a respectable distance for a very average MindSpeaker, so you should manage it with no difficulty."

Dean was quiet for a moment, staring at his plate.  "You seem pretty sure about that," he said eventually.

"That's because I have more faith in your abilities than you do," Castiel said dryly.

"And if I can do it?  What then?"

"Then we test it from a greater distance.  And don't start quibbling about how we'll do that," he added, when Dean opened his mouth to speak.  "I'll find a way.  Unless, of course, you'd prefer not to stay in contact when I go on circuit."

Dean scowled.  "I never said that."

"No, but you're determined to be negative.  I can tell."

"I'm not _negative_ , I just – "  He stopped.

Castiel raised his eyebrows.  "Dean?"

"Nothing," Dean mumbled.  He stabbed at his meal moodily.

Castiel kicked his foot gently.  "Dean?  You just what?"

"I'm not a teenaged girl," Dean grumbled.  Castiel nobly refrained from commenting on this.  "I ... you don't ..."  He sighed, frustrated, but finally met Castiel's eyes almost defiantly.  "Fine!  I don't get the point of a lifebond if we never get to be together.  Seriously, what's that about, Cas?"

It was a very good question but Castiel didn't have an answer for him, especially as he questioned their situation himself.  Life in a monastery, even a quasi-military one, had made it hard for him to mentally frame the doubts that wanted to surge up when he considered such things, but even priests sometimes looked askance upon some of the burdens the gods settled upon mortals.  And this question had been raising more doubts in him than usual; part of his new training had inevitably involved the study of Valdemaran history, including the biographies of notable Heralds.  The Herald-Mage Vanyel's history made for uneasy reading.

Dean was stabbing his fork in the air between them.  "So help me, if you say _The gods move in mysterious ways_ , I'll get Eslan to step on your foot when you're not expecting it."

_I might even do it, if he asks nicely._

Castiel laughed before he could stop himself.  "I don't need the pair of you teaming up against me!"

Dean looked pleased with himself.  "Too late."

Castiel smiled at this, but shook his head.  "I don't have an answer for you, Dean.  There's a philosophical argument that the gods put such challenges in mortals' paths to encourage us to grow – "

"Lovely," Dean said flatly.

" – But I already knew you wouldn't appreciate that idea, and I'm not sure how I feel about it myself sometimes.  Too many people pay with their lives for some of the challenges we all face.  I don't feel particularly inclined to lie down and declare defeat in the face of this one though.  Do you?"

"The gods shouldn't challenge me to grow.  They might not like what I'll grow into."

"Thank you for that disturbing image.  I'll make a point of mentioning it to Our Mother in my prayers."

"You do that.  But yeah, fine, I'm up for it.  Testing my ability to torment you from a distance, I mean."

Castiel rolled his eyes dramatically.  "Yes, I might have known you'd see it as an opportunity for mischief."

"Shouldn't have gone and got yourself lifebonded to me," Dean said smugly.

 

xXx

 

All joking aside, Dean was dubious about the likely results of experimenting with his MindSpeech.  The potential range of his gift wasn't something he'd previously thought about (who the hell had come up with the word 'gift' for something that was such a pain in the ass anyway?) and he'd been mildly surprised by Castiel's suggestion because it hadn't occurred to him to think of it as something _with_ a range.  Ellison had casually mentioned that Dean had a very clear mental 'voice', whatever the hell that meant, but was it really possible that he could speak mind to mind with someone who was on the other side of the city?

Also – _how_ was he supposed to do it?  Everything he'd been taught during that brief week at the Collegium had been designed to lock it down.  Until Cas had arrived back in Haven, and Dean had met Hawkeye, it hadn't occurred to him to actually try to MindSpeak someone deliberately.  All of his contact so far had been initiated by other people.  Did he have to drop his shields to do it?  And if he did, would everyone in Haven with a trace of MindSpeech hear him?

That was a really unnerving thought.

If that was possible, he realised reluctantly, then it would be better to find out quickly rather than waiting to see if anyone said anything or behaved weirdly around him later.  Of course, it was entirely possible that no one would hear him at all, including Cas.

The Roadhouse Inn was still bustling when he walked in, though it was growing late.  Ellen would surely be calling time within the candlemark.  Dean pushed his way through the crowd and found an unoccupied stool by the bar, and flagged down Podina, who was helping out.  She poured him a half of beer in short order and was gone again before he could toast her with it.

Dean eyed the noisy throng warily as he sipped his drink.  He hadn't forgotten the last time he'd loosened his shields around Ellen's customers, and the thought of doing so again was unappetising.  How far would he have to let go of them to make contact with Cas?

Staring into his beer, Dean tried to lower his shields just a fraction.  He was flinching inwardly in anticipation even before he made the attempt, and the noise of the taproom seemed to double in an instant as physical sound was supplemented by mental chatter. 

He slammed his shields back into place.  He couldn't see how he could possibly make Cas hear him when there was so much fucking _noise_.

Was it possible to shield out all these people while unshielding enough to reach Cas?  The mental acrobatics it took Dean to work out how this might be done had all the muscles in his neck and shoulders locking up with tension in record time.

Great, he'd discovered another way to give himself a headache.

Somehow, and deeply unsure of what he was doing, Dean mentally put all the people in the Roadhouse, along with their noise, behind a wall.  Then, feeling very much like he was holding that wall up with one hand while frantically waving a flag to get someone's attention with the other, he tried to lower part of the rest of his shields and reach out to Cas.

_That's a very interesting mental image_ , Castiel said, amused.

Dean was so shocked that he lost control of the whole thing.  The wall 'collapsed', he was hit by a deranged medley of song and ranting and fuddled speculation, and Cas was gone again.  He was tempted to smack his forehead on the bar but he didn't want to try explaining that away to Ellen.  Instead, gritting his teeth, he painstakingly re-erected the shield and reached out to Cas again –

Who was laughing fit to bust, the asshole.

_You were supposed to hear me! What did you expect?_

_Dude, I've never_ done _this before_ , he said, aggrieved.

_Well, you're doing it very well for a novice,_ Castiel soothed.  _Why are you double shielding though? You'll get a reaction headache if you keep doing that._

_Uh, because I have no idea what I'm doing?_ Dean retorted, annoyed.  _No one's shown me how to do this shit, you know, all they taught me was how to shield.  What if everyone from here to the cattle market can hear what we're saying?_

He actually felt Castiel's surprise, which was weird.

_It's highly unlikely, Dean, but let me show you a better way –_

He slid into Dean's mind like he belonged there and wordlessly displayed the technique.

_Huh_.  Put like that, it was elegant and simple, and made perfect sense.

_A lot of my own training in these things was non-verbal,_ Castiel explained.  _The Heralds seem to do things differently.  Try it now._

Dean let the second shield between him and Ellen's customers drop away.  Cas's technique worked perfectly.  There was still an awareness that people were there – and he could see at once why that would be useful, preventing embarrassing mishaps while his attention was divided – but there was no extraneous noise or disturbance.

_And I can hear you as clearly as if you were sitting next to me,_ Castiel said, satisfied.  _I must think of a way to test your range further, but I feel confident that we should be able to stay in touch at quite some distance._

_So it has possibilities, huh?_

_Certainly._

_Good._   Dean propped his chin on his hand and stared into his beer.  _So ... what're you doing?_

_I'm lying on my bed at the moment._   There was a brief mental image of Castiel's feet resting on a folded blanket in his clean little room at the Collegium.  _I might read for a while, perhaps._

_Yeah, no.  Forget that._   Dean downed the last of his beer, shoved his mug aside and stood up. _Give me a minute to get to my room._

Castiel was perplexed.  _Why?_

_Because I can think of some possibilities for this too,_ Dean told him.  And just in case Cas didn't take the hint, he sent him a selection of mental images. 

There was a startled pause.  Then:

_Why aren't you in bed already?_ Castiel demanded.

Dean grinned.

 

**_~ finis ~_ **

**Author's Note:**

> Some Valdemar-related stuff:
> 
> "Bad weather and brigands" – Dean is referencing a common Valdemaran saying: _Nothing comes out of Karse but bad weather and brigands_. The 'brigands' part refers to Karse's habit of avoiding outright war with Valdemar, while fomenting trouble on their shared border by having soldiers disguised as bandits staging raids on their southern settlements. The 'disputed land' between Karse and Rethwellan is a tiny kingdom called Menmellith that was once, historically, part of Karse.
> 
> The Temple of Thenoth is referred to in "Take A Thief" by Mercedes Lackey; Thenoth is the 'Lord of Beasts' and the temple takes in old, retired, and injured animals from those rare citizens who don't believe in literally working their animals to death. As it's a minor religion and essentially mendicant, the Order of Thenoth is extremely poor.
> 
> The Vateryan Uprising isn't a real thing in the books; I made it up based on the Vateryan Mountain range on the maps of Velgarth.


End file.
